


And the grass will become my crown

by dwellingondreams



Series: Barbed Wire, Grass Crown [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1950s, 1960s, Abusive Parents, Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Decisions, Bad Parenting, Blood and Violence, Bullying, Character Study, Child Abuse, Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, Coming of Age, Dark Magic, Dubious Morality, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Family Drama, Female Friendship, Flashbacks, Government, Government Agencies, Hogsmeade, Hogwarts, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Torture, Internal Conflict, Magical Amy Benson, Manipulative Tom Riddle, Minister for Magic Tom Riddle, Ministry of Magic (Harry Potter), Moral Ambiguity, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Murder, POV Third Person, Parent-Child Relationship, Parseltongue, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Politics, Post-Hogwarts, Pre-Canon, Present Tense, Psychological Trauma, Pureblood Culture (Harry Potter), Pureblood Politics (Harry Potter), Pureblood Society (Harry Potter), Single Parents, Slow Burn, Suspense, The Ministry of Magic (Harry Potter) is Terrible, Unhealthy Relationships, Unreliable Narrator, Werewolves, Young Tom Riddle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:29:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 49
Words: 337,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22574047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dwellingondreams/pseuds/dwellingondreams
Summary: "O, isn't this what my mother never wanted?" - Analicia Sotelo, 'South Texas Persephone'.Tom Riddle was not the only strange child to come out of Wool's. After eleven years of self-imposed exile, Amy Benson returns to Hogwarts to protect the only thing that matters: her precocious daughter, Mae. Offered the position of Potions Master, her alma mater seems like the safest place to keep Mae away from the darker elements of their world. But the wizarding world of 1957 is not the one Amy remembers, and while the threat of war may be over, she quickly discovers that peace in magical Britain is far from assured. As a radical new faction led by a charismatic Tom Gaunt rises to power in the Ministry, and a rapidly expanding Hogwarts braces for a post-war generation determined to leave its mark, Amy and Mae find that the secrets they keep for and from one another may be their undoing.
Relationships: Amy Benson & Tom Riddle, Amy Benson/Tom Riddle
Series: Barbed Wire, Grass Crown [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1628140
Comments: 1504
Kudos: 504





	1. Amy I

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not going to make any promises with the schedule here. I don't want to rush out chapters and I'm already updating another fic twice a week. Ideally this will update on Saturdays/Sundays, so that's when I would check here for new chapters (or just use a bookmark or subscribe, whatever floats your boat).
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).

GIBRALTAR, MAY 1957

Some habits are hard to break. When she was a little girl at Wool’s, sleeping in was never a question; everyone was expected to be dressed for breakfast by half past eight o’clock at the very latest, and even if you were willing to skip a meal to get more sleep, there was the constant rotation of chores. She knows now that the routine was important; they had sixty unruly children to look after, they needed to keep everyone on some sort of schedule. They had to prepare them for adult lives; they needed the discipline to occupy them, to keep them from dwelling too long on their bleak circumstances. It didn’t mean much to her as a child of six, but she’s in some way grateful for it now. She doesn’t look back on it fondly, but the memories don’t sting the way they perhaps ought to. If anything, it is a dull, comforting ache, like the reminder of flesh and bone when you clunk your knee on the underside of a table. 

Then she went away to school, and while no one was forcing her to get up and scrub floors or sweep stairs, she had classes and quidditch practice and matches, and living in a dormitory meant that as soon as one of them was up, all of them were up, no matter how comfortable the bed or cozy the room. She was always on the move, she recalls. She can count on one hand the number of times she remembers lying in bed, letting the warm sunlight wash over her from the small ground-level window above her head. There was always somewhere to hurry off to, things to be done, homework to finish, library books to return, a meeting with Madam Amell at the infirmary, laps around the quidditch pitch to run. Or Vera and Ruby were going down to Hogsmeade early and wanted her to come with, or it was the first snowfall of the year and she wanted to see what the grounds looked like, or it was exam week and she was too anxious to doze off again. 

And then she was done with school, and she was out in the big, wide world, and whatever sleep she got while working with the Relief Services, it was never enough, just short scraps and snippets, dozing off while sitting in uncomfortable chairs or slumped against a wall or beneath a tree in some war torn field where they were searching for more and more bodies charmed to be hidden from muggle view. Once she fell asleep in the back of a truck rumbling down a bombed out street in the middle of the day, the constant clamor and noise around her fading to a distant rumble in the back of her eardrums. When she found out she was pregnant she was too worried to sleep the entire night; she would lay awake feeling at the treacherous, definitive bump of her belly, or wincing because her breasts ached, or her back was in agony, or her hands and feet were starting to swell. 

After Mae, of course, well, sleep went out the window. She had an infant to tend to at all hours of the day. She doesn’t think she got a good night’s rest until her daughter was at least three and a half. Sleep has crept back into her life since then, the nights become restful once more, and she stopped jerking awake from some unknown terror, stopped sitting up so quickly her head would swim and looking around the room with wild eyes. She kept Mae’s cradle beside her bed, then her crib, then she slept with her until she was five. Mae squirmed and kicked and clawed in her sleep and mumbled to herself, but all of that was comforting, reassuring, compared to the thought of waking up and finding her missing or hurt. But even when she could sleep easily again, she always woke up early, usually before the sun had even risen. It felt like being ready, bracing herself for the day, not being caught unawares. As if she could somehow see any danger approaching so long as she got out of bed in time to meet it. As if fighting back was simply a question of preparedness and a good breakfast.

The morning after, she gets up before the dawn, puts on the dented kettle, and takes her tea outside to the tiny, cramped patio out back, where there is perhaps a few yards of rocky, barren earth dotted with old flowerpots and some cheerfully rusting lawn ornaments, and then the solid rock wall of the Mons Calpe. She’s not facing the horizon, but that’s alright. She prefers to watch the shadow of the sun rise over the rock. She finds it invigorating, usually. This rock has been here since the dawn of time. It will be here long after all she and everyone she knows are dead. It will be here even if the seas overflow and the sky rains down fire. No amount of war-machines or natural disasters could topple it. She takes some strength from it, maybe.

She sips at her tea, and presently Vera slips out to join her, curlers in her hair. “What’s wrong?” Vera asks quietly, without even seeing Amy’s drawn face, just knowing instantly from the way she is huddled in the battered wicker chair, her feet pulled up under her, her hair spilling out of its messy bun, her white-knuckled grip on her chipped mug. Amy clinks the teaspoon against the rim, dumps in some more sugar from the almost empty pot, and massages her aching scalp. Vera is as unobtrusive as ever; marriage and motherhood and a prosperous career have not made her any more assuming or strident. Amy wishes she had that sort of grace under fire. God knows Vera's had her share of hardships too, what with her parents and her brother. She sits down across from Amy, burrowing into her thick lavender cardigan as the wind cuts into them a little. It’s supposed to be scorching today, but for now it is still cool, especially in the shadows.

“He knows,” Amy says simply. She doesn’t have to go into detail; Patsy and Ted O’Neill have always taken her at her word as to how Mae came about and who her father is, but there was never much hope of hiding it from the likes of Vera or Ruby, not from women who were her closest friends during her time at Hogwarts. She’s already got so many lies to keep track of; it was easier to privately confirm to them that what they suspected was true. They don’t know the whole of it, of course- they don’t know what Tom’s done, they don’t know what she did to cut ties, they don’t know what the consequences of this could be, but they do know her intentions, and that her intentions have always been to stay here, raise Mae as best she knows how, and live a quiet, durable life.

“He wrote you?” Vera reaches over to take her hand, frowning. “How… did he say how he found out?”

“You could say that,” Amy scoffs bitterly, then sets down her hot mug, pushing some flyaway hairs out of her sleep-crusted eyes. “He… I don’t know that he’s completely certain. But he knows we’re here.”

Vera’s hand tightens around hers. “He didn’t threaten you, did he?”

“No,” says Amy, although the clawing sensation in her chest says otherwise. “You know that’s not his style. Far too aggressive for our Tom. Rising Ministry star. Newspaper darling,” she snorts humorlessly. She's painstakingly kept track of his steadily increasing emergence in the Daily Prophet, from the briefest of mentions to full page interviews. Gilda Skeeter described him as 'positively captivating, controversial policies aside' in her latest profile. “He’s just… making me aware that he’s aware. I’ve no idea if he heard about the job offer.”

“You should write him back,” Vera suggests. “Lie. Tell him he’s- he’s got the wrong idea. She’s not his, you had a fling, you’re happy where you are-,”

“I am happy here,” Amy snaps, then flushes like a schoolgirl, ashamed of her own thin skin. She's not supposed to be this fragile. She's tougher than that now. She was, at any rate. ‘Here’ was exotic and strange at first but now it’s utterly mundane. It’s not perfect and it never will be and she knows she’s probably doing Mae some sort of disservice, raising her in isolation on some sandy strait jutting out into the sea, knows this isn’t the ideal life for a child, but it’s better than what Amy had. It’s got to be better. Mae has a mother. Mae has a home. Mae knows she’s loved, and wanted. And Amy likes her work. It may not be groundbreaking, she may make barely enough to keep the lights going and to purchase their groceries every week, but it’s still important. She feels like what she does matters. She feels like she’s come to belong here, in her own way.

“You are,” says Vera gently. “But I know it must be very lonely at times, even with Pat and Teddy around.”

“She’s pregnant,” Amy mutters, resenting how bitter the words come out. When Teddy found out, he must have picked Patsy up by the waist and spun her about, shouting with glee. He probably rushed out to start buying things for the nursery immediately, already began debating names. Amy found out while sobbing with snot and wracked with coughs on a dreary October evening in rural southern France. They were living in an abandoned farmhouse surrounded by an orchard full of rotting fruit that had never been picked in time for the harvest. There were dead flies lying in clumps on the windowsill and she cried so hard her eyes nearly swelled shut. No one was there to congratulate or sympathize with her; she didn't dare breathe a word of it until she was nearly six months and it was becoming blatant.

Vera stills. “Patsy?”

“Yes. She flooed me the other day, couldn’t contain herself until they came back from Granada. You know they never thought it would happen for them.” 

Amy never thought it would happen for her, either. But she was stupid. It would be just like her to pull a grand plan off and then trip up on the way out the door. For a while it felt like some spiteful finally victory on Tom's part, although he couldn't have possibly known. She's been telling herself that for years. He couldn't have known. They were just children. Regardless of the rest, he was just a boy, and in some small ways still very innocent. She recalls an excruciating conversation just before their first time, her pointedly explaining exactly how to use a rubber and how under no circumstances was he to give her grief over it or suggest that she ought to be solely responsible. The look of thinly veiled disgust on his face had derailed her sober lecture and sent her into near hysterical giggles at how contemptuous he seemed about the whole thing; she can still hear his boyish voice; "Honestly, Amy, I'm not an imbecile, I've read medical texts-," Right. Medical texts. Fat lot of good that did either of them when they were rolling about in the long spring grass. Of course, she had other things on her mind at the time, and he... well, what did it matter to him? They were going to be together always. He'd likely written children off as an unpleasant but unavoidable consequence in the distant future. 

“That’s wonderful,” Vera says uncertainly, letting go of her hand. “What does that mean for the clinic?”

“I have no idea,” Amy exhales. “They have savings from Teddy’s parents. They were talking about taking a break from work for a year or two, maybe going back to England themselves.”

She gave birth here, on on a ragged quilt atop the cold exam table. Sabath had delivered babies before but after a brief inspection, left her to it with the local midwife, who gave her something to bite down on and told her to think of waves crashing on the beach. She'd thought of Cornwall and the orphanage's yearly trips to the seashore, until the war broke out. She'd thought of the cold sand and the seashell Tom had given her, to tempt her into exploring the cave with him. She'd thought of the bloated corpses in the water, vomited twice during her labor until nothing came up but warm spittle, and then thought of the opposite of the ocean; the bonfires at Samhain, roaring to life in her belly, bearing down on this guest who'd overstayed their welcome for far too long. She'd thought of the heat of the flames baking her tears into her cheeks, screamed herself hoarse, and pushed Mae out into the world in the sputtering light of kerosene lanterns and the nauseating smell of burning sage.

“You can’t run this place full-time by yourself,” Vera points out sensibly, and Amy almost hates her for it.

“I can’t,” she agrees after a long silence. “I’d need to hire help, figure out new schedules… And the position at Hogwarts, it would double what I’m making here. They’d cover all of Mae’s school expenses as well- her books, her uniforms- everything.”

“But you don’t want to bring her back there,” Vera’s tone wavers between question and statement. The rock wall is beginning to lighten; Amy can feel the air warming up even as they sit here. Her tea is growing cold. She takes another sip, grimacing.

“I don’t know what I want right now. Yesterday, I knew exactly. I made a choice. I chose to leave. I chose to keep her. I chose to raise her here. Now… you know she found the letter last night. From Hogwarts.”

Vera sighs quietly. “Was she upset?” That seems like a moot point.

“Well, she wasn’t thrilled with me,” Amy mutters. “It’s not a wonderful feeling to feel properly shamed by your own child.” And she does. Feel shamed. She remembers her own exhilaration, her joy at receiving her letter from Hogwarts, at that first visit from a stranger. She was so happy. She was leaving Wool's. She was going somewhere else, somewhere she was sought out, wanted. They wanted her, for her powers. Even the idea of having powers thrilled her. Of being powerful. She'd spent eleven years of life feeling nothing but powerless. It was a heady rush, and Tom felt it even more so than her, she thinks. It was like they were walking on air.

“She’d be safe at Hogwarts,” Vera says. “From… from whatever you’re worried about.” 

For Vera, of course, this is a domestic dispute, between two old childhood sweethearts. No less brutal and vicious, but not quite on the scale it takes up in Amy’s headspace. “He might just feel a duty to provide for her,” she adds in a softer voice, as if hesitant to even say it. “I know you… you have your reasons to want to be rid of him, but he hasn’t got any children of his own. He might just wonder… what it would be like.”

“Well, he will soon enough,” Amy finishes off the last of your tea. “You didn’t see the headlines in the society section, two months back? He’ll be married by this time next year. He can have plenty of little darlings with his society doll fiancee. Not her. She’s mine.” She knows her voice has grown ragged and rough. “The one- she’s the only thing I ever had all to myself. That I was responsible for. That… that loved me instantly. Mae is mine. Not his. He doesn’t… he doesn’t get any claim to her.”

“If he can find plausible evidence that he’s her father, he could take you to court over it,” Vera warns soberly. “If they obtain an order of Veritaserum-,”

“I know,” Amy bites out, closing her eyes, not wanting to think about as she feels the sun’s rays finally reach her face. “Unwed mother of dubious origins. Raising her child in some hovel in Gibraltar while she works like a dog healing gamblers and wannabe mobsters and idiot tourists. If I was a muggle they would have already taken her from me.” She can’t even say the rest. It is too painful. “I know, V.”

“You have to decide what’s best for both of you,” says Vera, “and you know Danny and I will do whatever we can to help you. Ruby would come back from New York in a heartbeat. But I would… I just wouldn’t do anything rash, Ames. I know you want nothing to do with him or his career or his life. But the job at Hogwarts… it might be the best thing for it. You’ll have Dippet and Dumbledore in your pocket, and the staff’s always been very close-knit. They have connections all over the place. They could really be useful, if it does… if he does escalate this.”

“The money wouldn’t hurt either,” Amy stands tiredly, rolls back her shoulders and groans. “Well. I should have seen it coming, really. Friends in high places and all that. Couldn’t keep scurrying around just out of sight forever.” Her tone is light, but the words fall like lead weights all the same. Vera stands as well, winces when she hears the clatter of footfall indoors. 

“The boys are up already. We should start breakfast, yeah?”

Once back indoors, it’s easy to leave the coldly pragmatic conversation out to sit in the sun like her forgotten mug. Amy bustles around with Vera, dodging elbows in the tiny kitchen, scolding her rambunctious sons for not saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, cautioning Mae against pouring the orange juice so quickly, they don’t need another spill, thank you- She hasn’t sat down to eat her breakfast in over a decade, but she leans against the stained counter-top like always and licks bacon grease off her fingers while Mae sprays toast crumbs across the front of her pyjama top and Isaac and Joel jostle and argue over the last fried egg. 

Despite their argument last night, Mae is utterly devoid of resentment or tension now, smiling toothily when she catches Amy’s eye, smearing jam across her toast as contentedly as ever, whistling along with the muggle radio station crackling from the windowsill. A child’s easy forgiveness is almost worse than the fights, Amy thinks. Maybe she doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. For any of it. She’s been living a lie. A safe, well-intended lie, but a lie nonetheless. If there’s anything Mae, bright and beautiful and glorious Mae-flower, hates, it’s being condescended or lied to. She could forgive the omission of her acceptance to Hogwarts. Amy knows she could never forgive the rest of, even if she wanted to.

If they go back, there is a strong possibility of Mae finding out. Amy always meant to tell her someday, but only after she was grown and settled herself, when she wouldn’t need a mother anymore, when she could hate Amy, ignore her letters, never see her again if she pleased, and still lead a prosperous life of her own with other people. You always find a family. You do, Amy knows that. She’s not worried about that, has never fretted about Mae not having a father or siblings or a ‘normal’ life. What she is worried about is her child hating her and that hate bringing her childhood to an abrupt end. Mae deserves better. She deserves a carefree, happy, easy life, where she doesn’t have to be afraid or hateful. 

And she is worried about Tom, of course. Of course she is. She’d have to be willfully foolish not to worry. She assaulted him, in every sense of the word. She betrayed his trust and his body, blackmailed him- threatened him, really- and then left him lying there on the ground, paralyzed, drifting into unconsciousness, while she fled into the night like a coward. Well, she is a coward. She chose the coward’s way out, she didn’t stay and fight, and she doesn’t regret it, has never regretted it. She is not his chosen other half. She rejects the notion that she could not live a fulfilling life without him. She doesn’t believe in fate, and she doesn’t want ‘love to conquer all’. She has no interest in being conquered or succumbing to something that has always felt more like a free-fall than flying.

He has every reason to want to hurt her just as badly as she hurt him. And that would be one thing, if it were just her. But it’s not just her. It’s never been just her. And when she found out she was four months pregnant and that her lack of monthlies and the weight gain had not simply been the stress of uprooting her entire life and tearing out the remnants of dark magic across Europe all while constantly looking over her shoulder, constantly on edge, expecting him to show up at any moment, for her entire plan to cave in around her- well, she thought about this then too. She found out much later than most but she still could have done something, could have ended the pregnancy, ridden herself of any lingering, stubborn trace of him. She didn’t. She was selfish, and weak, and eighteen. 

Mae doesn’t deserve any of this. Mae deserves a safe, happy life, not one where her mother has to seriously consider not just whether her father might try to take her away, but whether or not he might hurt her simply for the sake of hurting Amy. She should have left Mae off at an orphanage. She should have given her away to a nice family, a well-intentioned couple who could raise her in luxury and comfort. She should have known better than to think she could do this. She can’t do this. She is thirty years old and within the span of twelve hours and one little note, she has turned back into that same frightened girl, the one who almost stopped, who almost went back. The one who almost turned around, almost stayed. 

She doesn’t know what would have happened if she stayed. Well, she does. She does know. It would have been a life of very comfortable captivity. Mae would have brothers and sisters, and a big house to run around and play in, and all the toys and clothes a little girl could ever want. She would have family dinners on the weekends, she would have tutors to teach her French and Latin and the piano and ballet. She would have splendid birthday parties with all her little friends looking on enviously while presents piled high around her, she would have a broom and a pony and she would never eat beans on toast for dinner. Her name wouldn’t be Mae, either, that would be far too gauche and common. 

She would have a father rapidly climbing the ranks of government, a father who would likely ruffle her hair and kiss her on the forehead and buy her anything she liked, a father who would try to love her the only way he knew how, and if it was a cold, stunted, demanding sort of love, well, she wouldn’t know much different, would she? He would be genial and kind so long as she did what was expected of her and he would spend as much time with her as expected, if he didn’t have a meeting to attend to or a brief to read. 

She would have a mother who sank deeper and deeper into quiet self-loathing with every year. She would have a mother who her father hated, he hated, with every fiber of his being because even after everything, all his efforts, she still was not happy. She would love him but she wouldn’t be happy with him, and it would infuriate him, and he would be cruel about it because he would not know any other way to be, and they would despise one another, and they would try to hide it from their children but it would seep into that house all the same, it would fester in the very air they breathed, and leak out at every opportunity. 

Two days later all these thoughts are still rattling around like coins inside her head. She hates feeling paralyzed, feeling trapped. She hated it as a child, she hated it when she was eighteen and facing down the barrel of a life neatly laid out before, a slow, gruesome demise of any sense of self in the making, and she hates it now. She knows what she ought to do. She ought to leave. Go. Take Mae and run, disappear. Go over to the States; Ruby must have some connections, disappear into some big city, change both their names, dye her hair, and vanish. That would be the smart thing to do. How can she justify taking any measure of risk with her own daughter? She knows very well that Tom has no qualms at all about hurting others to get to her, and that was when he was doing it with what he considered the best of intentions- trying to prove how much he cared for her, how much he needed her by his side.

She doesn’t want to think about what he might be capable of doing now. He is stronger than her. She’s known that since she was fifteen. She is a far more capable dueler at thirty than she was back then, has been in plenty of dangerous situations before and had to rely on her own instincts and quick thinking, but somehow she doubts he’s simply spent the last decade reclining behind a desk with his feet up, smoking a pipe and growing fat around the middle. She may have improved, may be sharper, more cunning, resourceful and willing to do whatever it takes to win a fight, but he will still outclass her whether they’re using wands or not. Her sole advantage is that she knows how he thinks, and she knows how to trip him up. 

Either way, she cannot rationalize bringing Mae into any of this. They just need to leave. Not immediately, but sometime this summer or fall at the latest. It will be painful, and terrible for Mae, she won’t understand, she’ll be furious, but Amy will figure out some excuse, come up with some plausible story. She’ll home-school her if she has to, no matter how limited an education that might be. She’ll teach her to defend her, make sure she knows to be careful, that just because she’s a witch does not guarantee invincibility, and- and when the time comes she will tell her the truth. That Amy did it out of love for her. That she had no choice. She was just trying to protect her, to keep her away from all of this. And Mae will hate her.

“Mum, you look like you’re going to cry,” Mae tells her bemusedly as they walk back to the clinic after seeing Vera and her sons off. “Auntie V said they’d come visit again in the summer.”

Amy composes herself, plasters on an exasperated smile. “It’s just the dust. What, you think I’m going that soft already, huh?” And her daughter bursts into peals of high, childish laughter as she tickles her around the middle, squirming and giggling, swatting at her hands. Amy kisses her hot scalp, winces into the setting sun looming down on them overhead, and tries to quell the buzzing in her head and stomach and chest, a thousand anxious gnats, with little success.

How can she do this? How can she do any of this? This is ridiculous. She can’t spend the rest of her life on the run. She can’t spend it huddled in a series of shabby flats, always double checking the locks, either. Tom’s proved he’s very capable of tracking them down. For Merlin’s sake, he found their address, didn’t he? God knows how long he’s had that up his sleeve, waiting for the right moment. When she was a child at Wool’s, all she wanted was to stop running, to finally have a home, somewhere she felt safe and secure. She didn’t want to worry about bombs or planes or sirens. So what? Now she’s going to put Mae through the same thing, have her live a life full of tension and fear and anger over something that’s not her fault? Her blood broils; motherhood might have tempered her impulses the way it does most, but in other ways it’s also made her more of a live-wire. 

How dare he. This is her life. She fought for it, she earned it. She tricked him. Her, unassuming, humble, little Amy Benson. She outwitted him, everyone’s favorite savant. She is nobody’s fool, least of all his. He underestimated her once, underestimated the lengths to which she would go, and he’s still doing it, all these years later. If he thinks he’s going to send her running like a kicked dog, he’s got another thing coming. And if he thinks she’s going to dutifully present herself for whatever sick judgement he think she deserves, well, then he’s going to be sorely disappointed. 

No. She needs to think like him. Who is one of the few people Tom is actually afraid of? Dumbledore. Therefore it stands to reason that the last thing he’d want her to… would be to go back to Hogwarts. Under no circumstances would he ever want the possibility of Amy, who knows some of his ugliest secrets, working alongside Dumbledore, who has always seen more of what he really is than most people. She’s chopping the vegetables for dinner a little harder than necessary now, while Mae sighs over her homework at the kitchen table, casting longing looks outside. “Why don’t you take the bike out for a ride,” Amy suggests, and some newfound hardness in her tone makes her daughter look up in surprise.

“What’d I do now?” Mae demands. “I even kissed Joel and Isaac goodbye-,”

“Nothing,” says Amy, “but I can see you getting ready to crawl up the walls. Go out before it gets too dark, and come back in an hour for dinner.”

“Alright,” Mae says suspiciously, flinging down her chewed-upon pencil, and shoving her feet back into her shoes. 

Once Amy is sure that she’s gone, she leaves the cooking, goes upstairs, and sits down to write her reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from Pat Boone's "Friendly Persuasion (Thee I Love)", which was a top-hit British single in 1957. If this fic had a soundtrack, 90% of it would be deceptively cheery love songs from the 50s and 60s. 
> 
> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Oh boy. When I finished Barbed Wire back in October I had a brief concept of a possible sequel but nothing solid enough that I felt comfortable openly discussing it. I know it is an Ao3 tradition to write a fairly successful long-fic, then promise a sequel, start said sequel, and never follow through with completing said sequel, either because real life intervenes, plot ideas fizzle out, or said sequel just doesn't get much attention or feedback and isn't worth the investment of time and energy. I also have an impulse to not 'ruin' the first fic, which I am overall generally quite proud of and pleased with the character arc. So if people choose to view Barbed Wire as a standalone, I'm perfectly fine with that. I definitely don't want to in any way cheapen it with a poorly planned or executed sequel. However-
> 
> 2\. I've tried to talk myself out of this about a hundred times, but I couldn't shake some of the ideas I had, and it's been actively distracting me from plotting out other fics. I've been intent on writing another Marauders-era fic, but this fic kept taking up the head space this should have until I finally began to come up with some semblance of an outline. So here we are. With Barbed Wire I wanted to write a 'darker' take on the world of HP while also incorporating real life history and events and coming up with what I considered a believable portrait of a young Tom Riddle, while also having a very practical, pragmatic, take-no-prisoners heroine who didn't cut him much slack, make excuses, or fall daintily into his arms because she was just so overcome with love. 
> 
> 3\. My main interest with this as the sequel is showing a realistic adult Amy and a realistic adult Tom, as well as how they've both adapted and changed to very different circumstances since Hogwarts. In the time since graduating, Amy was thrust into parenthood as a single mother and also became a very capable healer and potioneer. Tom pursued a Ministry career which has finally paid off with him being in serious contention for the position of Minister of Magic. Both are still feeling the aftereffects of their frankly quite traumatic childhoods and obviously neither is 'over' the other. Barbed Wire was more of slow burn coming of age story/drama with some romantic elements and some moments of suspense and even horror. Grass Crown is probably the closest I will ever get to writing a straight-up thriller? I am going to be focused on believable world-building and slowly ratcheting up tension as this devolves into a game of cat and mouse between Amy and Tom. 
> 
> 4\. This fic is going to be fairly dark. Barbed Wire had its darker moments but overall was not very graphic and I felt comfortable giving it a 'Teen' rating because of that. Grass Crown, despite there still being a focus on young characters such as Mae and others, will likely earn the M rating. It handles adult topics and there are going to be some very disturbing scenes. I will try to keep everything properly tagged. I'm not trying to go for shock value or prove how 'gritty' I can be, I just feel that it's appropriate for the sequel to be darker and more serious in tone and situations, given how the characters have matured and developed.
> 
> 5\. We will be seeing some familiar faces from Barbed Wire, and some new characters who are still from canon, but there will also be a wide range of original characters. I understand that will be off-putting to some readers but I just don't see there being enough canon characters from this timeline in HP for me to really 'draw on' without making up some of mine own. I am very excited about introducing a few of them so we'll see how it goes. This will range from students Mae encounters, to staff at Hogwarts, to workers at the Ministry and members of Tom's party, to magical socialites and journalists, etc. 
> 
> 6\. I don't think Barbed Wire is a shining example of historical accuracy, but I'm going to try to stay hard on target with the late 50s/early 60s' time period in this fic. Obviously we'll spend more time in the magical world than the muggle one, but this is a period of massive societal change and overhaul in both, and Amy is going to have a bit of culture shock at how both wizards and muggles have changed since the end of the war. There will also be a lot of pop culture references. Mae is a curious, exuberant kid who is very much a product of her generation (the early Baby Boomers, haha) even if she is a witch. 
> 
> 7\. This would not exist without the overwhelming support and enthusiasm you guys showed Barbed Wire. I really appreciate so many people taking a chance on a very niche and weird fic that started as a one-shot about a girl and her lost marble.


	2. Mae I

GIBRALTAR, JULY 1957

As a rule, Mae’s never enjoyed cleaning much. Mum’s always seemed very passionate about it- she’s the type to lay out a whole schedule of what they’ll clean then, and she’s most happy just after she’s mopped the kitchen floor or washed the windows. She says it’s the satisfaction of a job well done. Mae just thinks it’s because she can pretend she’s throttling the mop when she wrings it out, or aggressively beating the rugs like they owe her money. She uses magic for a lot of it, of course, but some things, like scouring the bathroom or washing clothes, she insists on doing by hand because the cleaning charms are too haphazard or miss things. Mae doesn’t really care, only even when Mum’s set the dishes to wash themselves, she still has to be in the room to keep the spell going and make sure the dishes aren’t flinging themselves to the floor or the sink’s not overflowing. 

Auntie V says Mum’s always had a talent for charmwork. Mae wonders if she’ll have a talent for charmwork. Charms are useful, but boring. She’d rather have a talent for something more exciting, like Potions. It’d be a bit pathetic if, after her mum takes up the post of Potions Master at Hogwarts, suddenly it comes out that Mae can brew to save her life. But she doesn’t think that’ll be the case; she’s much more familiar with many of the common ingredients and herbs than most first years would be, and she’s been around cauldrons practically all her life. She’s never been squeamish, either, and she knows proper safety- not like those flighty witches or wizards who set themselves on fire because they couldn’t be bothered to change out of their billowing robes or tie back their long hair. 

Mae’s hair has always been kept short, which is good, because if it was long right now she’d be sweating buckets. She likes her chin-length pageboy, and she likes pushing her bangs back with her polka dot Alice band. Mum says Mae was never blonde as a little girl, unlike her, but Mae’s glad for it, even if she’d probably be cooler right now if her hair was lighter. She likes her dark brown hair and she likes that her skin gets brown freckles over her tan in the summers, even if it’s not exactly fashionable. What she’d really like is earrings, but Mum says absolutely not, she’s too young for jewelry and she’ll forget to take care of them and get an infection. 

Mae thinks an infection which could be easily cured with a sip of potion would really be worth the look. Mum has earrings, she just seldom wears them. They’re all really simple pairs though, little cheap hoops. Her most expensive ones are some simple pearl studs she got for Christmas from Aunt Ruby one year. Mae really wants teardrop rhinestone ones, like the kind you’d wear to an evening gala. Not that she’s ever been to a gala. But maybe Hogwarts will have dances. She’s heard Beauxbatons has dances every year. Mae is a really, really good dancer, and she’s not just saying that. She can do the Twist and the Stroll and she’s a great swing dancer, Mum taught her how, dancing her and up and down the narrow hallway until they bumped into the old mirror at the end, rattling it on the wall.

She loves music; anything and everything popular, as Mum would say, she’s got no account for taste, but Mae doesn’t care. There’s no money to buy records so she has to rely on the radio, but at least that’s regular. Usually it stops working while they’re casting spells in the house, but the last time anyone used any magic was this morning when Mum cleaned up a spill in the kitchen before hurrying down to the clinic, and Mae’s been extra careful not to accidentally let anything slip. She knows her magic’s a bit particular. Most kids her age have no control at all over it; their magic surges in and out like the tide with their emotions. So does Mae’s, but with hers sometimes she can… direct it a certain way. She doesn’t know any spells, not really, and of course she hasn’t got a wand yet, because Mum’s insistent they wait until they can go to Ollivander’s, but lots of times if she really, really wants something to happen… well, it just happens. 

Toys and books would fall off the shelves into her hands when she was little, or candy bars would disappear from the counter at the shops and into her pocket, or if she fell off her bike, she nearly always end up safely on her bum on the grass, not with skinned knees and hands in the gravel. It annoys Mum, but usually she doesn’t make much of a fuss over it unless someone gets hurt. And it’s not that Mae really wants to hurt anyone, unless they deserve it for doing something awful, like bothering a snake or lizard or throwing rocks at birds or street cats or calling her or Mum nasty names. She’s just not too bothered if it happens. They almost always deserved it, anyways.

Mum will be home in a little while or so, and Mae’s got almost all her bedroom cleared out. She even polished the floor with a dust rag, mostly so she could slide around in her socks to the radio while she worked. Mae shimmies, twists, and slides from bed to desk to chair and back again, cutting around the two battered suitcases on the floor. They’re not really moving out forever, Mum says, only for ‘the time being’, which means Mae isn’t really taking everything except all her clothes and most of her books and posters. She collects film posters. She can’t stand westerns, but she likes mostly everything else, even the drippy romances. Mum says it doesn’t matter how good or bad the picture is, Mae will scrounge up the pocket change to buy the poster so long as the art looks exciting enough. 

LIFE IS IN THEIR HANDS… DEATH IS ON THEIR MINDS proclaims _12 Angry Men_ , yellow and blue and knife splitting the poster down the middle. Audrey Hepburn prances across _Funny Face_ in black and white, legs kicked up high. Frankenstein’s monster leers down in blood red, noting PLEASE TRY NOT TO FAINT. Mae didn’t. Faint, that is. She likes the part where Frankenstein brings the Creature to life the best, mostly because the silly girls in front of her in the theater kept squealing and clutching at their snickering boyfriends. Then she almost got kicked out for throwing popcorn at them later on when they started necking. 

Mae has just finished carefully rolling up each glossy poster when she hears Mum calling her name downstairs. “COMING!” she hollers, fighting to be heard over the radio playing Donnie Lonnegan on full blast, then hurries out of the room and into the hall, slipping and skidding all the way to their stairs, where she finally gets some traction as she takes them two at a time. Mum locked up for the day an hour or two ago, then went out to ‘run some quick errands’ before it got too late. 

The sky is darkening outside, but Mum is shutting the door behind her, pulling the flimsy scarf from her ponytail and letting her hair fall down around her shoulder as she shakes it out. She slips off her red sandals and immediately unbuttons her blouse; the sun may be going down, but it’s still a hot, dry, night, and despite the stone around the building keeping it cool, Mae can feel the heat creeping in before Mum closes the door all the way and does up the locks.

“I wish you’d wear skirts out sometimes,” she says critically, as Mum strips off the blouse entirely, down to her faded cream slip, tucked into her worn capris. Mum likes nice things as much as her, but she rarely splurges on her appearance. Mae can’t remember the last time she saw her in a dress, never mind heels. “‘Specially if you’re going to the Virgo. You smell like cigars.” Mum does not smoke, because she says it’s terrible for you, and pretty soon they’re going to finally admit it. Except on New Year’s Eve, which is when she borrows Patsy’s fancy cigarette holder and stands out on the beach watching the fireworks with Mae, having a few contemplative puffs. 

“Well, I don’t go to the Virgo to dance and have a drink,” Mum rolls her eyes at her. “I go there on business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Not yours!” Mum ruffles her hair when Mae pouts at her. “I’ve got to pack some things away before I forget,” she raises a brown paper shopping bag and pats at her straw purse, “can you put the oven on? Patsy left some casserole-,”

“Ugh.”

“Don’t complain, we’ll be eating out tomorrow!” Mum stomps up the stairs, then groans. “And come turn off this bloody radio!”

“Bloody radio,” Mae mouths sarcastically to herself as she stalks into the kitchen to fetch the offending leftovers from the fridge. As if in vengeance, the radio upstairs squawks ever higher in song, before it’s summarily cut off by static. The kitchen seems oddly barren with everything tidied up into the cupboards and curtains taken down from above the sink. Mum says they’re renting in a flat in Hogsmeade for the summers, for very, very low rent. Mae would much rather just stay in the castle all the time, but Mum keeps telling her she’ll be singing a different tune after months at school. 

Mae doubts that very much, since she’s never been to any sort of formal school before. She’s almost excited for the uniform, although that was lessened a bit when she got a glimpse of one of the very few photographs from Mum’s school years. There was something unsettling about seeing her mother in miniature like that, a round-faced teenage girl with her hair pulled back into two braids, standing uncomfortably in a slightly too-big blazer, feet crossing and uncrossing at the ankles, squinting at the camera. 

Logically speaking, Mae knows Mum is not that old. Most women with eleven year old daughters didn’t just turn thirty this spring. But it never really seemed that way when she was little now. Now she’s beginning to realize that her mother’s only a few years older than Mr. Fierro’s daughter Marina, who sometimes helps him sort the mail at the Rookery. But Marina seems impossibly young, with her over-sized sunglasses and bright red lipstick and perfect bouffant. More like a knowledgeable big sister than a mother. 

Auntie V’s sons are much younger than Mae, and Aunt Ruby isn’t even married. Mae picks at the too-dry casserole, dwelling on this, and wonders not for the first time if Mum wouldn’t have rathered she’d waited until she could have a proper family, like with a husband and everything. Mum always says they are still a proper family, that they don’t need anyone’s permission to be a family, but Mae still wonders sometimes, what that would be like. 

“You’re very quiet tonight,” Mum finally says, when it comes clear Mae’s ate about all she’s willing to stomach. “Have some more salad. We need to get rid of this lettuce anyways.” She heaps more greens onto Mae’s massacred plate, then chucks her gently under the chin. “Hey. Are you feeling alright? You didn’t spend too much time out in the sun, did you? You never drink enough water, love.”

“I’m fine,” says Mae swiftly, then seeing an opportunity to turn the tables, “so what were you buying from the Cavillas, anyway?” 

Mum frowns, but there’s no point denying it; the only reason she’d go to the Virgo would be if someone was injured and needed a quick patch up, or to purchase something on the sly from Hector Cavilla or one of his sons. Everyone knows that, and Mae’s not stupid. It’s not as though Mum’s some kind of criminal- although at least that might be really exciting. She just hasn’t got any qualms about dealing with them. 

Mae thinks it must be from her time with the Relief Services. She’s eavesdropped on Mum talking about it with Patsy and Teddy before, and no matter what they try to tell her, it couldn’t have been all sunshine and roses. They saw some really horrible things, she’s sure of it, and that means her dad must have seen those things too, if that’s how he met Mum. 

“I wasn’t buying anything from them,” Mum says mildly. “I was just having a quick chat with Jaime Isola.”

“So what he’d buy from them for you?” Mae asks shrewdly, arching an eyebrow and smiling slightly when Mum glowers. She leans forward eagerly in her seat, fork scraping along the plate. “Was it something really dangerous? Like a cursed mirror, or a poisoned knife-,”

“You watch too many film noirs,” Mum shakes her head. “No, Mae, it was not anything really dangerous. It was just some things for our luggage, to keep them secure. We might have to go through a checkpoints, and I don’t want-,”

“What kind of checkpoint? Will they have guns? Does Britain have an army of wizards?” Mae asks eagerly, mind conjuring up all sorts of images of grim-faced soldiers in brown or grey, clutching rifles and waving cars through, like they show in adventure films whenever the heroes are trying to sneak into the villain’s headquarters. 

“Thank Circe, no,” Mum mutters. “Please- for the love of God, at least try to eat the salad, Mae-,”

Mae takes a massive gulp of lettuce and crushed cucumber, chewing in slow motion, unblinking.

“Thank you,” Mum says. “That’s really- that’s lovely, sweetheart. No. There’s no military, but they… it’s not like it was when I left. They’re very cautious about who they let in and out these days. Because of the war, I suppose.”

“We’re not at war,” Mae snorts, once she’s managed to chew and swallow all of it. At least it’s not spinach. 

“We’re not,” Mum acknowledges. “But we were. For a long time. And even though there was never any real fighting with Grindelwald’s people on British soil, there’s still a lot of fear. And paranoia. People were very frightened back then. He was the most powerful sorcerer anyone had seen in hundreds of years. He controlled massive swathes of magical Europe, and the parts he didn’t control, the Nazis had taken over.”

“So?” Mae shrugs with an eleven year old’s feckless nature. “That was ages ago, Mum. Auntie V was telling us how much better everything is. The Brits have their own wireless now,” she grins reflexively. “Can you imagine? _Cripes_ , that’s gonna be so nifty. I’ve never heard any of their songs before. You think they have regular radio hours? What about television? Maybe they’re working on that,” she rambles, “that’d be swell, imagine how they could do all the special effects- they could have a real Frankenstein’s monster!” She takes an eager sip of her milk. “Right?”

Mum blanches, then quickly composes her expression, lips in a thin line. “Maybe. They tend to be a bit… antiquated, over there. I don’t want you to be too surprised- a lot of the kids you’ll start school with, if they’re from old families, they won’t know anything about all your films and your music, Mae. They might not understand any of it.” She pauses. “When I was at Hogwarts a lot of the pureblood girls still wore their hair like the Gibson Girls and put on bodices under their shirtwaists.”

“So you’re saying,” Mae says slowly, “I’ll be the hippest one there?”

Mum looks at her for a moment, then nearly busts a gut laughing. Mae grins along, while subtly shoving some of her salad into her paper napkin, wadding it into a ball, and shoving it into her pocket. “No,” Mum finally says, “I’m sure you’ll meet plenty of other muggleborns-,”

“I’m not a muggleborn,” Mae points out, baffled. “You’re a witch.”

Mum’s laughter dies out abruptly, but she keeps her tone light as she amends, “I am, but I came from muggles, and so did your father. So in the eyes of most people, you’re as muggleborn as I am.”

“A mudblood,” says Mae, taking a perverse little delight in the way it slides out of her mouth.

Mum reaches over and swats her on the wrist. “What have I _told_ you- that’s a very dirty word, Mae Cora Benson.”

Mae recoils her smarting wrist, glaring. “But I am one. Why can’t I say it?”

“It’s not something people say unless they’re trying to be cruel and ignorant,” Mum says sharply. “I don’t want to hear about you going around calling yourself that at school. Or anyone else.”

“Will I get in trouble?”

“If I have anything to say about it,” Mum snaps, and that is the end of that discussion.

It’s a strange feeling to go to bed in your bed for the last time. Mae looks around her darkened room; the attic bedroom seems suddenly small and forlorn without the usual scattered books and trinkets and the walls bare and cold. She was so excited when Mum casually told her she’d accepted the position back at the end of May that she’d jumped up and down. Now that they’re really leaving it feels different. Strange. 

There will be more dancing around this room or examining her reflection in the mirror at the end of the hall, wondering if her father had dark hair and narrow shoulders like her. There will be no more ice cream from the little parlor on the corner near the nature preserve, there will be no more kicking a ball around on the beach, no more bicycling down the hill, the warm breeze blowing in her face. No more mocking drunk tourists behind their backs. No more bedtime stories. She thought she was so ready to be anywhere but here, anywhere at all, but suddenly it seems far more daunting. She pulls her baby quilt up to her chin and looks at her carousel night light, gently spinning one last time. 

Her door creaks open. “Are you still awake?” Mum murmurs.

Mae gives a sleepy groan, rolling over. Mum sits down on the edge of her bed and squeezes her shoulder. “Are you scared? About tomorrow?”

“No,” Mae lies, eyes closed. “I’m happy. Really happy, Mum.”

“Good,” Mum says, after a moment’s pause. “You can be happy for the both of us. I’ll do all the worrying.”

Mae’s gut twists. “We can still stay,” she whispers. “If you want. We don’t have to go. I can get a job too. I can do a paper route. Or work in a shop.”

Mum leans down and kisses her forehead. “Of course we’re going. This will be-,” she pauses, and Mae hears her swallow audibly. “This will be good for you. To be around other kids your own age. And we’ll still be together, so I can keep an eye on you.”

“I’m not _that_ bad,” Mae mumbles into her pillow.

“You’re not,” Mum says softly. “It’s not you I’m worried about you. It’s a very big, hungry world out there, just looking to swallow people up. I don’t want that for you.”

In her drowsy state, Mae envisions a gaping, dark maw of crooked teeth and lolling tongue, furling out before her like a red carpet. She imagines peering back into the world’s rotting gums, the smell of its breath. She turns up her little nose and rolls back over in bed. “Bet it’d just spit me back out.”

Mum chuckles at that, then kisses her again. “Good night, lovely.”

The morning is unusually quiet and unexpectedly dreary for the middle of summer, overcast and arid, no wind, just heat wavering in the air. Mae goes for a final walk just after dawn to the sand dunes to say goodbye to Fernanda and give her her final rat treat. She watches its grey body steadily slide down the length of the viper as she languishes across Mae’s bare legs. “ _I will miss your rats and mice, Warmblood_ ,” Fernanda reflects. Snakes are not particularly affectionate or sentimental, generally. Mae prefers it that way. It makes it less sad to leave her behind. A dog would whine, a cat would hide. Fernanda will go on just as she has been, curled up in the sun, drinking in its warmth, smelling out new smells and winding her way through the sand.

“ _I’ll come back to visit_ ,” Mae promises, “ _and catch you more_.”

Mum made her pick just three skulls to take with her, sweeping the rest of Mae’s collection of rodent bones, bleached by the sun and polished to a sheen, into the dust bin. Mum was the one who taught her how to kill them quickly, when she first realized Mae was bringing snakes food. Fernanda would prefer live mice or rats or shrews, of course, but Mum put her foot down and said Fernanda could very well catch her own live prey, so Mae is only allowed to bring her things she’s quickly killed herself. It’s not hard. Their heads cave in so easily, and they leave tiny blots of blood behind across the pads of her gloves. Mum’s paranoid about her catching some disease from doing it with her bare hands. But sometimes Mae doesn’t even need to lay a finger on them. They sense her magic and it stops their tiny hearts with fear, like a windup toy jerking into stillness. 

“ _Good_ ,” hisses Fernanda. “ _Are you going to the Cold Lands_?”

“ _Yes, for school_.” Snakes don’t need school, so she amends. “ _To learn new things. How to cast magic properly._ ”

Fernanda gives a derisive little twist of her triangular head. Animals are either terrified of or insolent of magic. Just look at cats, sniffing with disdain at their witches’ failed enchantments or botched potions. Mae doesn’t mind cats, but she does hold grudges about how easily they massacre snakes. “ _Will they teach you to hunt, Warmblood_?”

“ _Maybe_ ,” Mae muses. “ _What do witches hunt_?”

Fernanda slithers up her offered arm, and nestles her head sweetly into the capped sleeve of Mae’s blouse. “ _Each other_ ,” comes her muffled hiss.

They don’t have very much luggage, although it hardly matters when everything can be shrunken down with a quick charm, and Teddy and Patsy walk with them to the Office of Magical Transportation, which is really just a shabby little building down by the port, enchanted to look like a shop front under renovation. Mae is somewhat disappointed by the entire experience; if they were muggles they’d get to walk through the airport and take an airplane across the sea. Magical travel is very dull and cheap in comparison. A disgruntled wizard puffing on a pipe does a cursory inspection of their luggage, then grills them both in Spanish for several minutes as to where they are specifically going and when they expect to return to Gibraltar, before finally waving them through to the portkey, which is just an old men’s fedora hat. 

Mae has traveled by portkey before, but the last time was two years ago, and she’d forgotten just how disorienting it is. She doesn’t so much feel as though she’s spinning, but as though she’s being wildly jerked around by the arms, liable to go spinning into a wall at any moment. But there are no walls, of course, except the staid blue ones that materialize when they reappear a large hall marked with ENTERING UK - EUROPE with shimmering gold letters above their heads. Directly across from them, a family dusts themselves off, righting glasses and hats, under ENTERING UK- AMERICAS. 

The hall is packed to the brim with different queues, all marked out with velvet ropes, directing travelers to different counters to present themselves for entry into the country. “Damn,” Mum says under her breath, while Mae struggles not to vomit, feeling sweat bead down her neck. With a little more emphasis- “ _Damn_!”

“Did we take the wrong portkey?” Mae finally blurts out when she feels the contents of her stomach stop sloshing around.

“No,” Amy says, looking around the hall warily as they shuffle into place on the line. “It was supposed to be a straight shot to Hogsmeade. It’s been redirected by some sort of enchantment. We’re at the Ministry.”

“In London?” Mae brightens, feeling her nausea dissipate at the thought. “Can we stay the night? Can we go see the Tower, and Big Ben? Can we go to a dance hall? What about a restaurant? It wouldn’t even have to be a nice one- we could go see where you used to live,” she chatters as Mum fixes her scarf and straightens Mae’s collar.

Despite the chaos of the hall, all the twisting and turning lines seem to move very quickly, and Mae is still craning her head up, trying to catch a glimpse of the ceiling, which is displaying an-ever changing weather map of Great Britain, full of shifting clouds and passing rain showers. When one moves directly overhead she gapes all the more and stick out her tongue to catch one of the magicked rain drops; true to form, it tastes almost chemical and acidic, nothing like genuine rain. Mum says the same is true for conjured up food. Sure, you can enchant your glass of wine to keep refilling, but the wine will gradually degrade and taste worse and worse each time. You could survive off conjured food alone, but it’d be a miserable existence after a while.

“Mae,” Mum hisses under her breath as they approach the high marble counter. Mae puts her tongue back in her mouth and puts on her most winning smile.

The wizard behind the counter doesn’t look much older than her mother, although his dark blonde hairline is rapidly receding. He adjusts his spectacles as they approach, taking in their somewhat worn appearances, and the stiff, almost nervous way Mum slides over the manila folder of documents. No sooner has he slid the first one out that he pauses in his reading, and glances up, his mouth twisting in the barest hint of a sneer.

“Benson,” he says aloud. “ _Amy_ Benson?”

Mum stands there like a statue for a moment as Mae glances at her, then says curtly, “Burke. How are you, Charles?”

“As well as can be expected,” Burke says, not bothering much to hide his derision, although his brow furrows when he takes in Mae. He looks back down at their papers, ruffling the sheets. “And Mae Benson, your… daughter.”

Mae raises her chin imperiously, and says “How do you do, Mr. Burke?” in a tart little voice. She doesn’t know how he knows Mum- maybe they went to school together- but she doesn’t like the way he’s looking at them, as if they were dirt on the bottom of his new leather shoes. 

Burke behaves as if he hadn’t heard her, his sneer widening as he scans the sheet once more. “I see there’s no certificate of marriage,” he says at last, looking up and folding his hands over the paper in a faux-concerned manner. “And her birth certificate doesn’t have a father’s name listed. Now, I don’t mean to pry into personal affairs, Miss Benson,” with a heavy, scornful emphasis on the ‘Miss’, “but I’m sure you can see how that might-,”

“Muggle,” Mum says coldly. “He was a muggle. The Ministry only requires the father’s identity to be marked on documents if he’s of magical lineage.”

“A muggle,” Burke repeats, and then smiles slightly. It’s a smile that says ‘I’m much more clever and important than you, and I want you to know it’. “Well. Some things never change, I see. You were always _proud_ of your roots, Benson.”

Mum says nothing, which surprises Mae; she’s never hesitated to speak up in her own defense before. Now she just purses her lips and studies the marble counter. “No matter,” Burke continues, “As I’m sure you know, things are changing around here. All sorts of regulations and outdated procedures being updated. Why…” He hesitates when he glances over Mae’s letter from Hogwarts.

“It might interest you to know that muggleborn witches and muggle men can still produce magical children,” Mum says in a low, contemptuous tone.

Burke gives her a hard look, then exhales as if bemused. “Of course. Well, that’s very fortunate, isn’t it. There’s an article being drafted as we speak that would prohibit the international travel of mixed magical and muggle families without notifying the Ministry well in advance. For security reasons,” he smiles blandly. 

“Yes,” Mum says in that same viciously contained voice, and this is the angriest Mae has heard her in months, “ _security_. Our government’s new passion. Interesting how this only took precedence after thousands of civilians had been killed by German bombs.”

“Muggle civilians,” Burke corrects her, without looking up from their papers. “Yes. Things have changed. Progress marches on. Well. A position at Hogwarts is an admirable feat for a witch of your… background, Miss Benson.” After an excruciating pause, he finally stamps one of the papers and slides them all back to Mum, nodding for a nearby guard to let them through one of the main doorways. 

“I’ll be sure to give Headmaster Dippet your regards,” Mum says shortly, before taking Mae’s hand in her own and marching them through the door, only relaxing once they’re out in a massive lobby framed by gleaming skylights, burbling fountains, and imposing statues and portraits, posing for the tourists taking photographs. 

“What was that about?” Mae demands, wrenching her clammy hand free from Mum’s vice-like grip. “Did you know him?”

“An old classmate,” Mum says dismissively as she puts their papers back in her handbag, exhales, and straightens her back, squaring her shoulders. “We were never very friendly. I think he’s kept bit of a grudge since I scored on him twice in the span of seven minutes during a quidditch match.”

“Really?” Mae asks eagerly. She’s only been on a broom once or twice herself, and was clinging to Mum and cringing the entire time, but she does like keeping up with quidditch news and looking at the pictures from the international matches. 

“Really,” Mum says with a faint smile. “Ruby even made up a song about it. It was a little notorious. _What’s the score? Who’s to say? Burke can’t keep it anyways_!”

Mae’s laughter peals out high and clear through the crowded atrium as they hurry towards the nearest exit. The air in here smells sweet, clearly magically freshened every so often, but there’s something cloying and stale about it all the way. Mae would rather people watch muggles, anyways. Their outfits may be less interesting in terms of lack of feathers, scales, or sweeping robes, but they’ve undeniably got far more style than the vast majority of witches and wizards. But she does like the sound her penny loafers make as they tap out a distinctive pattern across the polished, almost oily slick wooden floor. 

She does pause to stare at the gleaming golden statues in the grand reflecting pool, however. The wizard triumphantly points his wand in the air, water spraying from the tip of it, his posture firm and proud. The witch is in a far more demure, passive position, wand in hand but not raised, her golden robes swirling delicately around her as she peers down with a gentle smile at an adoring centaur, goblin, and house elf. Mae has never met a centaur or a house elf, but she has seen goblins before. Mum healed one once in the clinic. ‘Adoring’ isn’t what she’d call him. 

Mum notices her staring at it and scoffs audibly. “ _For the promotion of equality amongst all magical brethren_ , erected in 1909,” she recites like a school girl. “We had a photograph of it in our history textbook when I was in school.”

“But they’re not allowed wands,” Mae says. “Only witches and wizards are.” She wrinkles her nose. “So it’s just there to look pretty?”

“Yes,” Mum says with a bitter look. “It’s just there to be pretty and collect donations for the hospital.” She stands there with Mae for a moment, looking at it, then sighs and fishes a sickle out of her bag, tossing it in a neat arc into the water. “Make a wish.”

Mae thinks frantically for a moment, then finally settles on something, and after sharing a small smile with Mum, follows her towards the nearest fireplace crackling green with Floo powder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So with this fic I wanted to expand the POVs so yes, we will also be hearing directly from Mae, not just Amy. And next chapter we will be checking in on Tom, so everyone buckle up for that, because it's going to get a little intense.
> 
> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Mae is a big film buff and spends most of her free time going to movies, talking about movies, or collecting movie posters. She idolizes popular stars like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly and is a big fan of noir and horror flicks, no matter how cheesy the special effects or plots. She's also a big fan of music, especially music she can dance to, as per the 50s/60s youth culture, and is, of course, rocking a pageboy and an Alice headband.
> 
> 2\. Like Tom, she has impressive control over her burgeoning magic for someone who doesn't know any actual spells yet, and she is fond of collecting keepsakes such as small animal skulls and bones, although they're going to the uh, good cause of keeping Fernanda the viper healthy and happy. Also something not particularly important but notable is that Amy gave Mae her middle name, Cora. 
> 
> 3\. Ideally I'd like to try to get into more detailed descriptions of fashions and whatnot in this fic, so Amy wears her hair in a very Hepburn/Bardot-esque scarf-ponytail combo, rocks a pair of capris, and wears a slip under her clothes because the potential of your bra showing through your top was very much a no-no back then. Something I also learned while doing research was that corsets and petticoats were still very much a thing in the 50s, just not to the Victorian degree we all imagine! Mae gets away with wearing clothing that Amy would never have been permitted to go around in as a little girl in the 1930s (although the vast majority of schools still did not permit girls to wear pants/trousers until the late 60s). Throughout this fic we can expect to hear about Mae wearing a lot of saddle shoes, Peter Pan collars, knit sweaters, cardigans, and blue jeans when she can get away with it. 
> 
> 4\. Amy has had some mild involvement in the Gibraltar underworld scene, something even Mae is vaguely aware of, to the extent that she feels confident enough to purchase stolen/smuggled goods through proxies. This is after a decade or so of tending to a lot of injuries brought on by bar fights, impromptu duels, domestic disputes, etc. We'll hear more about this and why Amy might feel the need to buy some sort of magical item on the down-low in the future.
> 
> 5\. After Amy's experience as a teenager with a fairly impassive Ministry that pursued a strict nonintervention policy, even when magical students were in probable danger from bombings and the like, we now see that things have uh... dialed up to 11 as of late in the opposite direction. The Ministry of the late 50s is very much becoming invested in everybody's business, from family trees to marriages to who's traveling where. In the eyes of the wizarding world, Amy is not only marked as a muggleborn witch, but now one with a probable child out of wedlock with a muggle as well, which opens her up to a lot of scorn and derision from purebloods such as Charles Burke. (Burke was mentioned a few times in Barbed Wire as one of Tom's Slytherin groupies. He's gone on to pursue a successful career in magical customs/immigration, to everyone's delight). Amy downplays this to her daughter by pretending as if it's just due to a silly school grudge over quidditch, not wanting to alarm Mae.


	3. Lydia I

LANCASHIRE, AUGUST 1957

“Lydia, are you listening?”

The brightly colored fish darts back into the wavering green reeds of the aquarium, and Lydia peers into the murky reflection staring back at her; the familiar anonymity of her own face, and her mother’s frustrated look just behind her, watching her peer into the glass. The aquarium is a very recent addition, installed three weeks prior at her sister-in-law’s overeager suggestion. Cecily is desperate to establish herself in a household usually firmly clenched in Cordelia Rosier’s manicured iron fist, and interior decorating must have seemed as viable an opportunity as any. Besides, Lyle was only too happy to dismiss it as part of her nesting- Cecily is six months pregnant and there is a cloying sense of palpable anticipation hanging over the estate. 

Most of the older families are having difficulties these days. The inbreeding, most likely, and the habit of scrubbing any marriages to non-pureblood wizards or witches from the family trees, have left what was once a veritable forest of magical connections and rich heritage looking rather sparse and barren. The Rosiers are not the Most Noble House of Black- they’re more than willing to overlook a halfblood spouse here and there, but even so, there’s only so far that accommodation stretches. Lydia’s parents have been married for over three decades, and still have only two children to show for it. That Lyle and Cecily announced the happy news less than a year after the wedding seems to be taken as a sign that things are finally turning around. 

“Yes,” she murmurs, tapping the glass with a nail in an attempt to coax the fish back out of the sea fronds and into the open. “I’m absolutely riveted.”

“Lydia,” Cordelia says irritably. “Would you do your mother the simple courtesy of looking at her while she is speaking with you?”

Lydia exhales, her breath fogging the cool glass of the large cerulean and turquoise aquarium, before finally turning back around. “Gladly.”

Cordelia’s over-applied lipstick to the top lip again; it’s nearly a shade darker than the bottom. Lydia debates pointing it out, then decides against it, feeling, she thinks, rightfully petty. They’ve been on the topic of the decor for nearly two hours now, a forced military march through the foyer, drawing room, library, kitchen, dining room, ballroom, sun room, study, veranda, up and down the main stairwell, and a winding loop back again. “Then what,” her mother says through gritted teeth, “was I just saying, darling?”

“The flowers,” Lydia waves a hand dismissively around the drawing room. “They look…”

Cordelia arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow.

“They look artificial,” Lydia settles on. “They look plastic. Common,” she sees her mother brighten at that word, “they look completely common, Mother. It’s one thing to have them dosed with Ever-Bloom and freshening charms, but this is…” She wrinkles the tip of her nose, currently small and pert. “Too put-on. We’ll look like we’re trying too hard. Where did you order them from, again?”

“Rosie Parkinson had that recommendation from the florists she used for her wedding to the Travers boy.” Mother appears to be searching for a name, which might be a little quicker were she not anxiously nursing a glass of sherry already. “Something Welsh. Now that you mention it, I did think the man looked a bit coarse-,”

“Tell Kit to cancel the enchantments, then,” Lydia declares. “Let them breathe a little.”

“But the wilting, dear-,”

“Mother,” Lydia exhales breathily, then affixes her best daughter-knows-best smile. “What have you always told me? Perfection is the ideal, not the reality.” She claps her hands together, the sound ringing out into the room. “Kit!” Her favorite house elf appears, blinking wide forest green eyes up at her, shifting from foot to foot. “I know you were listening, so you wouldn’t mind terribly fixing the flower arrangements?”

“Course Kit will, Miss Lydia-,”

“And-,” Lydia glances around again, taking a step away from the faintly glowing fish tank. “Oh, the ones in the vase in the hearth are just awful! Vanish those- but not the vase, I’ll take that-,”

Kit snaps her gnarled little fingers, ever-obliging, and Lydia hurries over to the heavy vase, grunting faintly as she heaves it up into her arms. “You’re tracking filthy water all over your clothes,” Cordelia says through her fingers, her hand pressed to her mouth in weary acceptance of Lydia’s sudden invigoration. “Lydia-,”

“Honestly, Mother, it’s just a dressing gown, let’s not catastrophize,” Lydia huffs, hoisting the vase under one slender arm. “I know just the thing for this, from the trellis by the fountain-,”

“Then have one of the elves-,”

“They haven’t got my eye, Mother!” Lydia shoves her feet back into her silken slippers, and shoulders her way through the half-open doors leading out to the veranda, ignoring her mother’s yelp of discomfort at her shamelessness. It’s a gorgeous August evening outside, from the warm wind coming off the rushing River Lune far beyond the edge of the estate’s grounds, to the wrens chirping in the trees and the thick, sweet stench of the roses, far larger than they have any right to be, blossoming across the span of the grand trellis above the gravel path. Lydia ducks under some hanging vines and brambles, feels damp leaves brush at her face, then finds herself enclosed on all sides by living things, pulsating faintly with the magical fertilizer that keeps them in a near constant state of bloom all year round, even in the depths of dreary, wet winter. But they look far better in the golden light of a summer evening, something natural and proper about it, as opposed to the odd sensation she always feels staring at them in the midst of a dark winter’s night, that sinking feeling that something is not right.

The effect is more pleasing than disturbing at the moment. Lydia trails her hands across the satin-soft blossoms, then puts her fingernails to one of the stems. Her nails immediately extend and sharpen into near claws, easily cutting through the thick green stems. It’s cruder than a simply severing charm, of course, but seeing how no one is around to scold her over it, she doesn’t mind much. Sometimes it feels better to do things yourself, and not with the wave of a wand. One by one the roses plop into a perfect bundle in her palm, before she trudges over to the fountain, slipping slightly in the dewy grass.

She’s filling up the vase with fresh water, ignoring the continuous attempts by the stone cherubs to splash her in the face. She’s just slotted in the last flower when she registers the clamor of nearby wind chimes, signaling that a family member has apparated onto the grounds. “Cecily’s on a crying jag again because you weren’t back in time for lunch,” she says without turning around. “Be a dear and go cheer her up before she’s inconsolable. We can’t have her wandering around the party sniffling.”

“Meetings ran late.” Lyle shrugs off his dark green robes and transfigures them into a cravat around his collar as he adjusts his suit jacket. 

“Don’t bother,” Lydia only glances up briefly from her roses. “Mother will want you to change. You smell like the Ministry. Fusty old men and security charms.”

“I’m shocked you can smell anything over those monstrosities,” he jerks his head at the bouquet as he sits down on the edge of the fountain. “What do they fertilize them with? The blood of a virgin?”

Lydia brushes one of the petals against her chin, then realizes she hasn’t corrected her nails back to their ordinary, flattering length. Hastily she retracts them. Lyle follows her glance, then sighs. “Distracted today, are we?”

“Well, it’s not every day we host a campaign party,” she says with faux brightness. “Mother’s petrified the Bulstrodes will show up early again before the hors d’oeuvres are ready.” 

“If that’s the worst thing that happens I think we can count ourselves lucky,” he runs his hand over the rose petals, before Lydia clutches the vase to her chest protectively. “Shouldn’t you be getting changed? Not mucking about in the gardens?”

“Speak for yourself,” she says haughtily, straightening up.

Lyle rolls his eyes and easily wrests the vase from her. “Go ahead. She’ll drop dead on the spot if guests arrive to see you running around out here in a dressing gown and slippers.”

“They wouldn’t even know me,” Lydia retorts sardonically, but walks ahead anyways, ducking back under the trellis.

“Don’t forget your ring!” he calls after her, sounding slightly harried by the weight of the vase in his arms, before she hears him curse and cast a simple levitation charm when water sloshes over the side and onto his trousers. 

The ring in question glints grimly up at her from its position in her girlish jewelry box, which was a birthday present when she turned thirteen and was finally deemed old enough for ‘real’ pieces. It certainly wasn’t cheap, nor common; Tom had it specifically designed to her measurements- or, well, the measurements of a finger that could potentially be hers. It’s not as if sizes of jewelry or clothing mean much to her. She can make everything fit perfectly regardless. She slips it on without much thought, lets the light catch it and make it sparkle,,then slips it back off and on again feeling a little wisp of relieved excitement curl up in her. She has this nagging, illogical fear that one day she will try to take it off and her finger will wither and fall off instead.

White gold, square cut, accent diamonds on the shoulders. Very young, very trendy, and very much suiting her. It looks young and fresh and glittery, not at all like her mother’s dowdy old hunk of Edwardian metal, or even Cecily’s very understated matching emerald ring and band. This is the sort of ring people look twice at when she walks past on the street, something shop-girls fawn over and waiters whistle at when she blushes over her menu. She’s heard every variation of “Lucky girl, landing a rock like that!” and “So who’s the lucky fella?” possible, and she demurs sweetly each time- “You don’t think it’s too much, do you?”

Of course it’s not too much. This is really the least she deserves, she thinks, a ring that she actually wants to wear. “New money,” Lavinia Urquhart whispered at a tea a few months past. “Of course he’d pick something gaudy for her-,”

“Like buying a dog a diamond collar,” Miranda Crabbe had agreed, pursing her lips. “I don’t know how she can stand it. There’s really no accounting for taste, is there? And he proposed while they were out to lunch- if William hadn’t had the good sense to ask me at home, I don’t know what I would have done- can you imagine, the… the gall of it-,”

Proposals of their ilk are supposed to take place in an adjoining room while the bride-to-be’s family waits anxiously, eavesdropping at the door, so they can swoop in at just the right moment to offer up their congratulations and begin discussing who’s paying who what. Or like poor Missy Avery, it happens while your spinster older sister is chaperoning a walk around the gardens, and your dolt of a fiance nearly drops the ring down a well because her cawing raven familiar is putting him on edge. 

These same women were all smiles when it came time to congratulate the happy couple, of course. They sent cards and flowers and little trinkets and they sidled up at cocktail parties and charity fundraisers just so Tom might glance at them, blushing furiously, as they pretended to be oh-so-interested in what color scheme Lydia thought might be best for a spring wedding, and where they were going to hold the ceremony, and who might be the bridesmaids. There is no reference to the crude gaffes of new money then, or snide references to how ‘well’ she’s filled out since her sickly, pallid youth, the withered little rosebud finally blossomed.

“I’m so happy for you,” one of the few truly genuine girls had said- Thelma Carrow, clasping Lydia’s hands tightly in her own. “Twenty three’s a wonderful age to be engaged, don’t you think? Poor Nettie’s twenty six, and no suitors! Best to get these things out of the way early, Mummy says- now you’ve got everything all tidied up and planned!” She’d lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “And I know this lovely little villa in Spain you could use for the honeymoon, if he doesn’t want to go too far-,”

Lydia doubts they will be honeymooning in Spain. Tom’s not one for travel; he’s only ever gone out of the country on business, and while of course he will take time off work for the wedding, a fortnight at the seashore or some luxurious hunting lodge up in the highlands is all she’s expecting. That’s alright. She’ll have plenty of time to travel on her own after she’s married. In fact, she’s looking forward to it. Coming and going unquestioned. She won’t be Lydia Rosier anymore, she’ll be Mrs. Tom Gaunt, and new money or dubious background or not, her husband will be the youngest Minister in British history, and she will, of course, be everyone’s darling, the perfect blushing young bride. A newspaper doll. A real trendsetter. She could get used to that.

Truthfully, none of this is all that shocking. Everyone naturally assumed an engagement would be announced shortly before the campaign bid. Married men are more trustworthy. They’re assumed to be invested in more than their own welfare. They do well in opinion polls. And Tom Gaunt has been sniffing around her family for quite some time now. Lydia faintly remembers when he and Lyle were in school together, how his name would occasionally surface in conversation. Her parents never thought much of it until it became public knowledge that he was a Gaunt, not just some halfblood social climber desperate for the approval of pureblood society. 

The name Gaunt used to mean something, until they all descended into madness and poverty, at least. But there was enough of a legacy before that, of a time long ago before the Statute ever existed, when their kind lived like kings and often ruled like them as well, that people remember. Purebloods like her parents have no choice. They have nothing left but fond memories of a bygone era. The future holds nothing but uncertainty and worst of all, dreadful change. Lydia’s always found that funny. 

She showered barely an hour ago, so she sits down to fix her still slightly damp hair. She prefers it strawberry blonde and silken smooth, and Tom prefers light hair to dark hair, so that’s easy enough. He’s never said as much, but she pays attention to the women he looks twice at. Mother would say that blonde or auburn hair is simply better with her ‘peaches and cream’ complexion. Lydia bites her lower lip and watches the color shift in the mirror, from dusky lavender to vivid crimson to a youthful shade of pink. She runs her hands through her hair, smoothing it further, and then begins to braid. Mother is always after her to wear more of an up-do, and Cecily thinks she’d look lovely with tight, shining curls in a center part like Grace Kelly- as if Mother knows who Grace Kelly is- but Lydia likes her chignon at the exact center of the nape of her neck. It emphasizes how slender and swan-like it is, the skin creamy pale in contrast to the copper sheen of her hair. 

She always keeps her eyebrows just a shade darker, to emphasize the striking features of her face better. Her nose is always small, narrow, and pert, her eyebrows are thin and slightly arched, her lips are always rosebuds. Her chin is never too sharp or too soft, her cheekbones sit high under the fresh faced skin, her forehead is well-proportioned to the set of her doe eyes and her immaculate hairline. Her eyes are large, a soft jade green, and doe-like, framed by the darkest eyelashes she can manage. 

She always spends extra time applying her makeup; her face is malleable, moldable, like a lump of clay in her able hands, but she can’t conjure up eyeshadow or eyeliner. It’s important not to look too put together. She is just twenty three, as everyone keeps reminding her. Too much makeup makes a woman look old and faded. And Tom prefers a more natural look; he’s not one to openly speak about appearances, but he’s reminded her about what they ought to be projecting before. Lydia might take more offense to it were he not just as scrupulous about his own appearance; he might reek of new money, but he certainly doesn’t dress like it. 

The first time he came to call she could tell her mother and father were impressed with his restraint; no flashy outfits or ill-thought-out haircuts. He sat and stood and spoke properly as well, and flawlessly conducted himself throughout the evening. He didn’t interrupt her father, he praised her mother’s home. He didn’t drink much but he was more than willing to join her father and brother for cigars and brandy after supper. And he treated her as he might a little sister, because this was when she was just nineteen, still reduced to a child by her family, talked over and coddled, trotted out in front of company. 

“Lyle’s told us so much about you, Mr. Gaunt,” was the first thing she can recall saying to him all night, from her position at her mother’s elbow, posture stiff and rigid, hands clasped in her lap. She’d been wearing new embroidered robes to compliment her dress. They’d whispered when she stood up and sat down, and when Lyle had bothered her to go refill his drink, she’d watched Tom Gaunt out of the corner of one eye as she took the glass in hand and summoned the bottle with her wand in the other. He’d been watching her, not with open desire or bemused indifference, but something else entirely. He’d been watching her as if he wanted to cut her open and see what made Lydia Rosier tick. 

“Shall I get yours as well, Tom?” she’d asked, because by then he’d insisted they ought to be on first name basis, surely, and he’d just shook his head, the glass clasped tightly between his long, pale fingers. 

“I prefer to do some things myself,” he said. “Us bachelors are very set in our habits.”

And her mother had tittered without looking up from her Witch Weekly, and Lydia had surmised then that he would likely not be a bachelor for much longer, and when he exited that state of being, it would be with her at his side. He was not here to pay a social call to a tipsy Lyle, he was here to scout out a potential wife. This had been further impressed on her when her father had suggested she show Tom the roses, then in full natural summer bloom in the gardens, as they are now. 

That was very unusual. Ordinarily they would never have permitted her to go alone outside with a man she’d only met a few hours prior. But Tom had a way of making everyone trust him intrinsically. It was not that he came across as utterly harmless and affable. But he had a certain bright warmth to his smile, and he spoke and moved so assuredly, that he seemed incapable of malevolence. He’d finished his drink and they’d moved outdoors as one; Lydia had discreetly adjusted the length of her legs so she could better match his stride, because he was rather tall, and when he walked he did so with innate purpose. He seemed incapable of strolling around anywhere; she was almost breathless by the time they reached the trellis.

“Beautiful,” he’d said, although he’d kept his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He had not been looking at the roses at all, in fact.

“I’m very fond of them,” Lydia had carried on as if she had not noticed. “You know I… I didn’t get out much as a little girl, and this was my sanctuary, the garden. I used to help the house elves tend to them.” She’d stood up on her tiptoes to touch one of the blossoms, because that was more charming than making herself shoot up in height or extending her arm. 

“I’m glad your health’s recovered now,” he’d said. “It’s a pity you didn’t get to experience Hogwarts. Truly.”

“You enjoyed it very much, then?” She’d come back down to rest on the balls of her feet, looking up at him curiously. Lyle had told her, with a note of bitter envy, that Tom Riddle, as he was known then, had always been very popular. Beloved by the faculty. Admired by the student body. Prefect, head boy, lady’s man- 

“Didn’t he wash his hands of Irene Greengrass after the Veela scandal?” she can remember chuckling at some point.

Lyle had shrugged. “It was never very serious for either of them. He spent far more time around that Benson girl, but she would have been completely inappropriate, of course.”

“What Benson girl?” Lydia had arched a brow. “Halfblood?”

“Mudblood,” he’d said dismissively. “Hufflepuff. They knew each other from before school. She played quidditch and swaggered about like a man. But he was well through with her by the time we were seventh years. I imagine they both had what they wanted from each other by then.”

“Oh,” Lydia had said airily, “so it was more of a physical…” She’d let the words trail off.

“Obviously,” Lyle had sounded amused at the idea of it being anything else. “I never saw the appeal, frankly. Some foul-mouthed little slut from the gutter. Experience was about the only thing she had going for her. But I suppose that was part of the appeal, for him.”

“Very much,” Tom Gaunt had told her then, under the rose trellis. He was handsome, but she could see now the shadows under his eyes. She wondered what could be keeping someone so apparently successful up at night. He obviously didn’t drink much. “Those were the best years of my life.” Surprisingly, she had thought him completely truthful for that instant. 

“Well, you’ve plenty of good years left,” she’d teased with a juvenile bent, locking her arms behind her back and rocking back on her heels, gravel crunching underfoot. “You’re hardly an old miser yet.”

“Here’s hoping,” he’d quirked a dark eyebrow at her, and then she’d giggled and taken him to see the greyhounds, and that had been that.

Polly and Art are waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs when she does come down, finally dressed, coiffed, and perfumed. Her dress is perfectly suitable for a mock casual cocktail party; a vivid, flirtatious shade of red that makes her hair and eyes pop, brilliant satin organza with a bow on each shoulder. It goes perfectly with the ruby hummingbird hairpin holding her chignon braid in place. She’s wearing her sheer robes bundled like a wrap shawl off her shoulders, but she’s planning to dispose of that annoyance as soon as their guests start arriving. This family needs to get with the times, or at least attempt to approach them. No one wants to see a woman shrouded like a convent abbess greeting guests on a warm August evening.

Cecily looks pale and tired, her arms locked across her belly. With one sharp look from her mother-in-law, she straightens obediently, dropping her arms to her sides and shifting from heel to heel. Those tight patent leather pumps must be killing her swelling feet, Lydia observes, but she’s not here to play nanny to Cecily, who is twenty six years old and knew exactly what sort of people she was marrying into. Lyle is either oblivious or apathetic to his wife’s discomfort; with him it varies on a daily basis. Watching Cecily attempt to coax genuine human engagement and emotion from Lyle is like watching someone try to teach a dog to sing. Amusing, but ultimately pointless. Poor Cece never had a chance. Lyle’s always preferred his secretary, or failing that, anything in a skirt that has to address him as ‘mister’.

“You look gorgeous,” her mother enthuses, tucking a stray flyaway hair behind Lydia’s small ear. “I always knew red was a good color on you.” Cordelia Rosier’s own father was a Gryffindor, so that might have something to do with it. Contrary to popular belief, purebloods and their sacred ideals used to run rampant in all four houses, but over the generations they’ve concentrated primarily to Slytherin, where, most everyone can agree, conservatism and family loyalty are everything. It’s just easier all around to try to mold children who will be sorted there, where there’s less of a chance of… conflicted loyalties further down the line.

But that’s all just hearsay for Lydia. She never attended Hogwarts. She was too sickly and fragile. A wand was a special sort of treat, dangled tantalizingly out of her reach until she was nearly thirteen, when her parents could be certain she could ‘control herself’. And she’s never let them down in that regard. Well, nearly never. Belatedly, she realizes she forgot to apply a new coat of varnish to her nails. They still look nice, just a little faded. Fortunately, her mother doesn’t notice.

“It’s important you stay in view all evening,” she’s telling Lydia now. “This is in Tom’s honor, of course, but remember- you are the one steering the ship.” She grips Lydia’s dainty elbow a little too tightly. “Don’t shrink into the background, darling. No one picks a wallflower.”

“Perhaps I could juggle for them,” Lydia says drolly, scratching Art behind the ears. “Or walk a tightrope across the gardens.”

Cecily spasms with silent laughter at her little joke; her mother is not as impressed. “Don’t poke fun,” she snaps. “You haven’t seen him in nearly two weeks.”

“Obviously, he’s about to leave me for some muggle waitress from Liverpool,” Lydia mutters. “It’s the only logical conclusion, Mother.”

“Engagements have been called off for less before,” her mother drops her voice to a whisper. “You need to remind him of why he chose you.”

“I’m very grateful,” Lydia says, and she is, she supposes. Her father has never had to work. Lyle works because it hampers his drinking at least a bit. If she weren’t marrying Tom and about to secure them some very lucrative investments and business deals through him and his network of connections, if she wasn’t about to be wife to a Minister of Magic, Lyle’s son would certainly have to work to keep this place afloat. 

“We’re all very grateful,” her mother reminds her, and then there is the tell tale sound of apparitions and the crackle of Floo fires, and the evening begins in earnest.

It’s not the largest party they’ve ever hosted; her debut into society was much larger, a proper ball with at least three hundred guests, a line of awkward youths and smiling mothers waiting to introduce their sons to her. She’s glad she’s not marrying any of those callow boys. Tom flatters and flirts in public. In private, he largely leaves her to her own devices so long as she minds herself. There are no crude come-ons or awkward jokes about the looming spectre of married life. He doesn’t grope or leer. He doesn’t feign interest in her hobbies. She can count the number of times they’ve kissed on the mouth on both hands; each time was chastely warm without being sloppy or dismal. If she didn’t know what she knows she’d almost suspect he preferred men. 

Tom arrives fashionably late and with company, as is his penchant. This time his surprise guests are some wealthy older couple he knows from his days working at Borgin & Burke’s. He takes the wife’s fur cape for her and the man’s hat, depositing both on the coat rack that will vanish them into a separate room as Lydia swans over, her heels clicking pleasantly across the tiled floor. “Tom,” she calls out pleasantly, his drink already in hand. He always likes an Old Fashioned, which she always finds amusing, because you’d never suspect he had any fondness for citrus. Maybe the smell reminds him of something nostalgic. 

“I’m not terribly late, I hope,” he puts a hand on the small of her back to kiss her on the cheek while the couple fawns over them- such a perfectly suited match, her small and bright, him tall and dark- and she returns the favor, kissing him back and pressing the drink into his hand.

“Of course not. We couldn’t have a minute of fun without you.”

“I’d like to introduce you to Mr. and Mrs. Prince,” he says, stepping back so she can properly greet the married couple. The Princes are both tall and dark-haired, although the wife clearly dyes hers black to avoid the grey, and the husband’s is more salt-and-pepper than anything else. They’re the sort of couple that look as though they could be related- and maybe they are- they have similar long features, prominent noses and big ears, sharp cheekbones and wide foreheads, and dark eyes. Prince, she tries to recall the surname, Anglo-Irish, she thinks, they run some sort of potions supply company, one of those mail order ones-

“Pleased, I’m sure,” the wife says, taking Lydia’s hand in her own. She casts a sly glance at her husband. “Edgar was just wondering when we might finally lay eyes on the Rosier daughter. But you are a beauty, my girl.”

“You’re too kind, Mrs. Prince,” Lydia says diplomatically, turning to Mr. Prince. “Are you the same Mr. Prince of the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers? I thought I saw an article where you were mentioned in the Prophet not six weeks ago.”

Edgar Prince goes rigid with pride, and his wife launches into a delighted account of her husband’s many accomplishments, his acceptance into MESP being the least of them, of course, and Tom extricates himself from the conversation to go to say hello to the Mulcibers, who have just arrived. Polly is growling at Virgil again, before the greyhounds are ushered out-of-doors by an apologetic Lyle and Cecily. Lydia doesn’t blame the dog. Virgil Mulciber just narrowly skirted another trial not six months past. The muggle girl who was supposed to give testimony vanished, quite literally. Lydia doubts she will reappear as anything other than some transfigured parts in a river. But his uncle is still a Hogwarts governor, after all, and it’s important to have an in with those people.

Lydia is trapped in conversation with the Princes, who don’t seem to go out to social gatherings much, for the next hour. There’s nothing particularly special about them, aside from a family penchant for brewing and a highly successful business. They have a daughter, Eileen, who was just named prefect. “You must be so proud,” Lydia gushes, and sees from the looks on their faces that they are more relieved than anything else. 

Once the food is laid out, it’s a relief to be able to pull herself away from them. Lydia doesn’t touch any of the prawns or little sandwiches, because she wasn’t raised to be seen eating appetizers in public, and instead takes roost out on the veranda, smoothing her skirt and shrugging out of her shawl as she sits in one of the wicker chairs and sips delicately at her daiquiri. Tom finds her there, watching the breeze ruffle the hedgerows and the dogs chase each other through the grass. His drink is only half finished, although the ice has long since melted. 

“You smell like oranges,” she observes when he sinks silently into the chair across from her, hands crossed over his narrow knees, as always. He looks good; a side part doesn’t look nearly as pompous on him as it does on many men his age, and she’s relieved he’s always kept clean shaven; elaborate beards and mustaches will never go out of style for wizards, but on him it’d just distract from his fine cheekbones and perfectly straight nose. He even has nice lips. She’s seen plenty of handsome men in her life, but none half as pretty as him. There’s something inherently boyish about him, something charming and squeaky clean.

Well, perhaps not ‘squeaky’ clean.

“Your brother reeks of whiskey,” he replies. “I suggested your father have the elves cut him off.”

“Hm,” says Lydia, unruffled. “Does Lyle have something in particular to celebrate?”

“The latest polls are looking better,” he is all business, as usual, although he keeps a hand relegated to her forearm, so from a distance they could be assumed to be speaking happily with each other, all abuzz with wedding planning, flushed from their drinks. “And Tuft’s on her guard now. The Wizengamot’s not as convinced in her as they were this time last year.”

Ministers of Magic are ‘elected’ in so far as every magical citizen of Great Britain over the age of seventeen gets a vote. The majority of votes alone does not secure the position for the candidate. Ultimately, the Wizengamot will confer, vote with the confidence of the people, and appoint the new leader. This was a great debate when Wilhelmina Tuft was first elected; the Wizengamot was split, then reconvened and appointed her after further conference on the matter. “That’s wonderful news,” Lydia says now, and leans over and kisses him on the cheek. “You’re a shoe-in. She’s tired. She barely even wants the position. She’s only running again because the party is pushing her to.”

“It will be my pleasure to relieve her of the burden, given her son’s… inadequacy.” Tom says dryly.

This time two years ago, Ignatius Tuft was widely considered a shoe-in to succeed his mother. Then the news broke about the Dementor breeding proposals. The last Lydia heard, he’d been exiled to the Department of Muggle Artefacts in disgrace. Poor bastard. 

Music filters in from inside. “We might have a little dancing,” Lydia says with a hopeful edge. She does like to dance. Mostly by herself. In her bedroom. Alone. At night. She just casts a muffling charm and plays the gramophone for as long as she likes. It’s soothing. Sometimes she screams and throws things, too.

He exhales audibly. Tom is not overly fond of dancing, although he’s not what one might call clumsy. “But I’m sure you’re hoping to drop back in the office before it’s too late,” she says hurriedly, at the look on his face. Tom is head of the Improper Use of Magic Office. He was brought into the position at twenty five, another record breaker. 

“I think I can tolerate one dance,” he contemplates the glass in his hand for a moment, then finishes it off, setting it down on the glass table and standing suddenly, pulling her to her feet in one fluid motion. Her wrap flutters down onto her seat. “Don’t bother,” he says, before she can turn for it. “I like you better like this.” He fingers one of the bows on her shoulders. “You should wear red more often.”

“So should you,” she says, brushing a finger down his midnight blue dinner jacket. “It’d look good with your hair.”

He offers her his arm and begins to lead her back inside. “You know,” Lydia murmurs into his ear, taking pride in the way he bends his head down to listen to her. Tom has always taken her seriously. She appreciates that, even when he is angry with her. He demands her very best. Nothing less than that. And she’s always been good at tests of endurance. “I heard the funniest thing from Mr. Prince earlier tonight. They’ve a new pending application for the MESP.”

“It was my understanding that they only accept three new potioneers every year,” he says as they slip in through the glass-paneled French doors, sheer curtains ruffling at them as they go. 

“Yes, but this one is being pushed in by Armando Dippet.” Lydia may have never attended Hogwarts, but every man, woman, and child in magical Britain knows who the headmaster is. And… “And Albus Dumbledore.”

He stiffens, but does not break his stride. “A replacement for Slughorn, I suppose. He did them no favors, dropping his post with no warning like that.”

“Yes,” Lydia says, “only I thought- and this is the funny thing, Tom- I thought you might know her? Amy Benson. Wasn’t she a schoolmate of yours?”

A few couples are steadily swaying in the center of the dining room, the table gone, the chairs all pushed to the walls. A cello is playing itself. He guides her out onto the marbled floor with ease, puts his hands on her waist while she locks hers behind his neck. “That is very funny,” he says, in a voice so completely devoid of color or tone that it takes her breath away for a moment, the ice in his dark eyes. She can feel his pulse throbbing in his neck, furious. “I hadn’t thought of her in years.”

This is hardly the first time he’s lied to her face, but it is the first time he makes so little of an effort to disguise the truth. Lydia takes the warning for what it is, and obediently drops her head, averts her gaze. “Thank you for dancing with me,” she says sweetly instead, as if the past minute of conversation had not happened at all, and feels him relax minutely. “It was so good of you let us host, Tom. Mother loves any excuse to throw a little party. And I’d missed you.”

“Did you,” he says, light and conversational once more, despite his iron grip on her narrow waistline. 

“Of course,” Lydia smiles brightly, feeling her lipstick smudge slightly across her teeth. She licks it away with a flick of a forked tongue before it fuses back together again, all behind her painted lips. “That’s what love is, isn’t it? Missing people terribly, and waiting for them to come back, only so you can do it all over again?”

“In a sense,” he agrees dispassionately, his gaze locked on something over her shoulder. Then he glances back down at her. “But I’m never all that far away.”

Her father is watching them while laughing at some joke Abraxas Malfoy’s just made. Lydia smiles all the wider, and presses a quick kiss to Tom’s lips. He lets her, never breaking their sway all the while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I know most people were anticipating a Tom POV for this chapter, not that of his fiancee, but in my defense, Lydia is also an *extremely* unreliable narrator and I thought it would be interesting to reintroduce him to the story not through his or Amy's eyes, but of someone else entirely. We will see a Tom POV in this story at some point, but for the time being I wanted to ease back into his life via Lydia, who knows more than she lets on, but who still doesn't know everything. I avoided doing a Tom POV in BW because I wanted it to be solely Amy's story and I felt that it would take a lot of the tension of Amy not knowing what he was thinking away, but I think we've moved into such higher stakes now that it doesn't matter as much.
> 
> 2\. I know some parts of this chapter may have been very confusing. To clear some things up: Lydia was never mentioned or referenced in Barbed Wire. She is the younger sister of Lyle Rosier, who is mentioned several times in BW as being one of Tom's little gang. Lyle was in the same year as Amy and Tom. Lydia is seven years younger than them, making her twenty three in 1957. Given the time period, her social class, and her family's very traditional values, she does not work and lives at home with her parents, brother, and sister-in-law. Her parents are Gilbert and Cordelia Rosier, who we will be seeing more of in this fic, and Lyle's pregnant wife is Cecily Rosier.
> 
> 3\. More on Lydia that is mentioned in this chapter and may have seemed vague: Lydia, as she mentions several times, was considered dangerously ill/fragile as child with an unnamed disease or condition and home-schooled, rather than sent away to Hogwarts like her elder brother. She mentions that she did not receive a wand until much later than most magical children, and as shown in this chapter, does not seem to particularly enjoy using magic or casting spells, instead preferring to do things herself. Lydia also, as you probably picked up on unless you skimmed this, has the ability to change her appearance at will, even in very subtle ways. Because otherwise someone will likely still directly ask me in the comment section: Yes, Lydia is a metamorphmagus. Some of the specifics/history of her abilities and exactly how powerful her shape-changing is will be covered throughout this fic, so I'm not going to go into too much detail about it here.
> 
> 4\. The Rosiers consider themselves practical people, and unlike the Blacks, are not opposed to halfbloods marrying into the family, so long as they keep producing witches and wizards. They would not be so tolerant of Lyle or Lydia marrying a muggleborn or muggle. Like many of the older pureblood families, they seem to be having some serious fertility issues, which Lydia personally blames on past inbreeding within the same few family trees for centuries. In Lydia's opinion, they are so gung-ho about the marriage to Tom not only because he's accumulated some serious political power, but because they think they're going to be financially better off because of him in the future.
> 
> 5\. My major criteria for developing and writing Lydia was while in some ways she is an obvious foil for Amy, I still wanted her to be 'fun'. By that I mean I want people to be uncomfortable with how much they like her. I did not want her to come across as A. a slightly younger Narcissa Malfoy constantly tossing her hair and looking down her nose at people, B. a slightly more stable Bellatrix Lestrange cackling to herself every five minutes, or C. a slightly older Pansy Parkinson with a stereotypical 'mean girl' persona. That's not to say Lydia is a good person or a helpless victim of her own family, but I do want her to be dynamic, and interesting in her own right, not just because she's engaged to Tom. 
> 
> 6\. The specifics of the relationship between Tom and Lydia are going to be gradually displayed in future chapters. It's not a 'fake' engagement or some kind of publicity stunt- they have every intention of marrying one another, and have known each other for several years now. I mentioned in early comments that Lydia likes some things about Tom that Amy disliked, which is to say that Lydia and Amy have very, very different moral compasses and ideas of what a 'good' relationship dynamic is. Something not-so-horrific that Lydia does like is that Tom takes things quite seriously, and seems to take her and her role as his fiancee quite seriously, so in her mind, she could be doing a lot worse, even if the engagement was all but decided without any input from her, the young woman getting married. 
> 
> 7\. Fun side note: Lydia loves dogs and has two greyhounds, Polly and Art, short for Apollo and Artemis.


	4. Amy II

DIAGON ALLEY, AUGUST 1957

It was raining the very first time Amy ever set foot in Diagon Alley, and it is raining again now, although this is a proper evening drizzle, the kind that will soak you to the skin within minutes, not the breezy daytime shower she recalls. It’s funny. She’s never believed herself to have a particularly strong memory, but she does remember that day. Everything seemed so large and grandiose, even in the pattering rain, but she supposes that’s because she was so small. Her and Tom both, scuttling about like two little mice in a world populated by prowling cats. 

Amy doubts there are any pictures of either of them prior to their time at Hogwarts; but she can still perfectly recollect what he looked like as a little boy, those big dark eyes in that paper pale face, his neatly parted hair and bird-like wrists. She used to tease him about how long his eyelashes were, how delicate his face, until she realized the older boys at Wool’s were doing the same thing. She was selfish that way; if she was going to rib him about something, it couldn’t be so blatant that others might intrude on her territory. She thinks he felt the same way about her; he was very content to snap back that she was stupid, block-headed, and a snot-nosed cry baby to boot, but God forbid anyone else talk to her like that. 

She has no such vivid image of herself at that eleven; she supposes she was a bit blonder and shorter, although that’s not saying much, side-stepping puddles and wincing every time her wet shoes squelched against her stockings. Tom had little patience for her constant complaints of how freezing she was in, having to tramp around outside for hours on end in a skirt. Then again, he was the sort who would refuse to wear a hat in the middle of winter, because it might muss up his perfectly coiffed hair. Vain thing. They must have looked completely bedraggled when they turned up on the doorstep of the Leaky Cauldron, must have attracted all sorts of strange looks at these two unaccompanied children in very muggle clothes, skirting around the edge of the dining room and towards the door out to the alley.

But they were children, and even Tom must have had a sense of oblivious wonder to him back then. If she ever misses him at all, she must tell herself firmly, because missing and regretting was never something she allowed herself to dwell long on, it was too dangerous- if she ever misses him at all, it’s when she sees something of him in Mae. It’d be easy to be repelled or disturbed by it, maybe, but Mae is the sum of both their parts, and Mae is wonderful, and it is better to look at her and her curious, intense nature and the way she knots her eyebrows together when frustrated and how she takes the stairs two steps at a time when she is in a hurry and the way she lights up when she enters a library, and think about how he could have been that and that alone. Not all the rest. 

“Did you see that man?” she asks Amy in hushed fascination, as Amy pulls out her wand and begins to tap the corresponding bricks, the practiced pattern ingrained in her still, even all these years later. “The one with the scaly coat? His pipe- the smoke from his pipe, Mum, it was making all sorts of shapes- like animals! And it was purple! What d’you suppose that was?”

“Not tobacco?” Amy offers unhelpfully, wincing as a particularly fat raindrop splatters across the brim of her sun hat. Fat load of good it’s doing her now. Spend over a decade away from the isles, and suddenly she forgets how unforgiving the weather tends to be. Mae was initially mystified by the grey skies and the constant passing showers, although her attention was quickly diverted by the towering buildings and endless clamor of construction when they picked their way through a London that Amy barely recognizes anymore. 

Mae, annoyed with her lack of encyclopedia-esque knowledge on the wizarding world, wrinkles her nose and adjusts her beret in frustration, shifting from foot to foot like a tap dancer in between acts. Then she is distracted by the temporary marvel of the passageway to Diagon Alley opening, and her mouth falls open in delight. “Neat!” She reaches up to touch one of the shifting and turning bricks with a bare hand, but Amy grabs it before she can make contact.

“What have I told you about messing with things like this?” she scolds as they hurry onto the market street. “That’s how you lose a finger!”

“You could just put it on back for me,” Mae retorts, shoving her mercifully-intact hands into the pockets of her tweed raincoat. She’s already managed to lose the cinched belt for it, to Amy’s unsurprising dismay. The girl would lose her head if it wasn’t firmly attached to her body via her neck. Her attitude towards physical injury doesn’t help matters. On the one hand, Amy is relieved Mae’s never been squeamish about blood or gore, given her mother’s line of work. On the other hand, Mae manages to make most scabs and bruises last weeks, the way she picks and prods at them, and the fact that her magic once saved her from scalding her four year old hand on a hot stove didn’t help matters.

There’s nothing quite like saying, “I told you it was going to burn,” to your child only to find that the painful but necessary lesson of ‘why we don’t touch hot things’ was not only nullified, but completely flaunted. 

“Only if I had the finger- you know what, never-mind,” Amy says hastily, as they pass by a young mother pushing a toddler in a pram, sucking his thumb. If the sun hadn’t begun to set before the rain began, it has by now; the lamps have all come on, and many of the shops are preparing to close within the hour; dissembling their displays outside and sweeping out the interiors. She especially picked this time, on a week day, in the second week of August. The massive crowds trawling for school supplies will have already been here on the weekends in July, and they’re not close enough to September 1st to get caught up in any last minute rushes either.

Mae complained about having to wait so long in the first place, but it was easy enough to put her off with unpacking things in their new little stone cottage across from the music shop in Hogsmeade, and then they were able to get most of her supplies in the village anyways, and at a discount. Amy already put in the order for her uniform. They’re really just here for her wand and some things from the apothecary. But best to avoid the place when it’s packed, she thinks. Less of a chance of someone even tangentially associated with Tom or any of his cronies, spotting them- well, spotting her, and it making the rounds. 

She’s certain he’s aware by now that she’s back in the country. But Hogsmeade still feels safe in a way that London, be it muggle or magical, very much does not. Dumbledore may be off on his usual travels for the summer, but everyone knows he could be called back to Hogwarts at a moment’s notice. You’d have to be very bold to try something in the village right under his nose. He’s been acknowledged as one of the most powerful warlocks in Europe, after single-handedly defeating Grindelwald in that duel. Vera once told her that Wilhelmina Tuft reportedly offered to campaign for him in the election right after both wars had ended, but he refused any notion of politics, aside from his seat in the Wizengamot. 

The same Wizengamot that will be convening on Martinmas when the votes come in to decide who will rule as Minister for the next seven years. But best not to think too hard on that. It’s none of her concern; she’d have the same disgusted apathy towards their government regardless of who wins, and it’s not as if there aren’t certain checks and balances in place. They’ve had plenty of eccentric and a few downright sinister Ministers in history. She remembers that much from school, at least.

Despite the time of the day and the dreary weather, there is still a reasonable amount of foot traffic, and Amy is continually surprised by all the new shopfronts and covered stalls she sees set up. It’s not that Diagon Alley itself seems all that much larger, but surely it wasn’t this congested when she first came here in ‘38? Christ, she feels ancient for a moment. Surely it wasn’t that long ago. But it was. It was 1938 and she was eleven years old and positively giddy, as excited as Mae is now, skipping ahead across the cobblestones, one hand on her purple beret, dodging groups of people coming out of shops and cafes without so much as an ‘excuse me’. 

Amy picks up her admittedly sluggish pace to catch up with her as the old shopfront of Ollivander’s comes into view, looking just as dark and foreboding as it did when she was young. She hasn’t been sleeping well, these past several weeks. She blames it on the new bed. Chances are, she’ll end up spending most of her nights in the castle, once term starts. Most of the faculty hasn’t come back yet, but Cringle the caretaker was still there, and he gave her a brief tour and let her have a pick of where her office and official quarters should be. Like hell was she going to spend the foreseeable future holed up in some dingy rooms in the dungeons, even if she had to teach there.

Amy picked a sunny set of rooms on the ground floor, just a corridor away from Professor Beery’s office, which she has such fond memories of. She hasn’t done much with it yet, but there is a space that she can put a private bed and desk in. She’ll feel better sleeping in the same building as Mae, even if Hogwarts is far better protected and warded than she ever could have made the clinic. That hasn’t stopped her from inscribing those same painstakingly copied runes around their cottage in Hogsmeade, just in case. A powerful wizard or witch would still be able to break through the lines of protection, but the point of warding a home is to have some forewarning, not to make it impenetrable. 

Mae leaps over a large puddle and falls just slightly short, sending back a splash that spatters across the front of Amy’s coat and her already worse for the wear trousers.

“Mae!” she snaps, more harshly than she meant to, but her daughter is too excited to care, already having reached the worn awning of Ollivander’s, a hand on the door. 

“Well, come on then,” Mae says impatiently, shifting with restless energy, unable to keep the small smile from her lips, and for an instant she sounds so much like Tom that Amy just stands there, water dripping down her trouser legs and onto her shoes, before she snaps herself out of it and follows her into the shop, wiping rain from her face.

She stiffens as soon as her vision adjusts to the very dim lamp light, forcing her to recognize that the Ollivander behind the counter, polishing a wand, is in fact the very same man who sold both her and Tom their wands all those years ago. Amy is legitimately flummoxed; he looked to be at least in his sixties when she was a little girl, and she would have thought a son or nephew- anyone, really, might have taken over by now. But it is the exact same old man, she’s sure of it, aside from some new wrinkles and even more of a silvery sheen to his ancient eyes. 

“Miss Benson,” he says in a voice of mild surprise, as if it had only been a few years since he saw her last, and not nearly two decades. 

Amy sees his silver gaze slid right through her and back out again, like a stone skipping across water, and forces a polite smile, putting her hands on Mae’s tense shoulders. “Hello, Mr. Ollivander. How have you been?”

“Me?” He sounds even more surprised to be asked, setting the wand down and adjusting his spectacles. “Oh, much the same. A very fortuitous crop of wand wood this year.”

The heavy dust in the air is making her nose itch terribly. “This is Mae,” Amy says, nodding briefly to her daughter. “She’s… she’s very excited to get her wand.”

She’s praying, really, to anyone who will listen, that he doesn’t mention Tom or say anything that might provoke Mae’s suspicion, or worse, her ravenous curiosity. But whether Ollivander senses her unease or not, he simply inclines his head and shuffles off his high stool. “Step forward, Miss Benson.” Mae hesitates for a moment before she realizes he is now referring to her, not Amy.

That same old tape measure floats off the counter and towards Mae. Amy thinks she probably flinched and cringed away from it as a child, but Mae willingly holds out her arms and stands perfectly still, looking more enthralled than baffled or frightened. “Right handed,” Ollivander muses, “like your mother.” 

Tom is right-handed as well, although Amy once watched him almost effortlessly switch to his left hand when they were young and imitating a teacher’s handwriting for a joke. 

As in on cue, Mae says, “I’m going to practice with my left too, so I’m never at a disadvantage.” She sounds faintly proud, either because she proved she could use ‘disadvantage’ in a sentence in casual conversation or because of her dreams of fluid ambidexterity. 

Ollivander murmurs an assent, and Mae goes cross-eyed briefly as the tape measures the length of her nose and the space between her bright blue eyes. It retreats to the cluttered counter. The wandmaker stands there for a moment, the lamps casting strange shadows across his gaunt face, like an artist considering a great sculpture. “Well,” he says at last. “I’d be very surprised if I was not correct on the first try when it comes to you, Miss Benson.”

Without moving the rest of his body he holds out a hand and crooks his wand towards one of the shelves further back in the recesses of the shop. There’s a few thumps and bumps before a narrow wand box comes skittering through the air and into his hand. Mae gives a little gasp of delight, as though at the circus watching a man swallow flames. Amy resists the urge to melt into the doorway, and crosses her arms under her chest, relieved Mae is too distracted to notice the tense look on her face.

Ollivander sets the box on the counter, removes the lid, and then slowly hands it to Mae, who breaks into a genuine grin to find herself holding a wand for the first time. Amy tenses even more, if that were possible. “Ash. Eleven and a half inches. Phoenix feather core. Pleasantly springy, with a delicate spiraled shaft. Well, give it a go.”

Much like a dark-haired, serious little boy many years before, her daughter tightens her grip on the wand, then sweeps it downwards like a conductor beginning a concert, and for a moment everything seems to freeze, as if drawing in a collective breath. The lamps sputter and flicker out, Amy watches in a combination of amazement and horror as her breath mists in front of her face, as though she were standing outside in midwinter, not in a cramped little shop that was very warm just seconds ago- The temperature in the room drops instantly, frost creeps across the yellowed windows, and the dust motes in the air sparkle like snow.

Ollivander coughs, and the spell of sorts is broken. Amy feels the air begin to warm again, and the frost dissipates like morning dew. Mae looks around wildly, wand still clenched in her small fist. “Was that right? Did it work?”

“It worked,” Amy says hoarsely.

“Quite well, I might add,” Ollivander sounds slightly taken aback as well, but does not let it linger for long. “I thought ash might suit. Very loyal, it is. It tends to cleave to just one true master, so I wouldn’t recommend leaving this in your will, young lady.” He allows himself a breathy little chuckle. “Your heirs might not find it very useful. Now, as they say- rowan gossips, chestnut drones, ash is stubborn, hazel moans. Is it safe to say you are a very obstinate individual, Miss Benson?”

“Just like my mum,” Mae smiles with all her white teeth.

“I thought as much. Stubborn but courageous, that is what ash tends to favor, and a phoenix feather core would settle for nothing less. Very selective, phoenix feathers are. Why, the phoenix your feather is from… I can only recall selling a wand with one of its feathers one other time.”

“When?” Mae naturally demands, and Amy’s heart thuds against her chest, barely restraining herself from chucking some coins at Ollivander and frog-marching Mae out of the shop and back into the rainy night.

Fortunately, the wandmaker simply says, “Oh, years before your time. You should feel honored. This wand will expect great things from you. Transfiguration, ash tends to excel at, and the lack of rigidity should give a bit of a boost when it comes to charmwork, I should say. Just as your mother’s wand was uniquely suited to healing.” He offers Amy a faint smile, which she struggles to return.

“How did you know?” Mae wants to know, as she reluctantly puts the wand back in its case. “That my mum’s a healer?”

“An old wandmaker’s hunch,” he shuffles back behind the counter to ring them up, and Amy doesn’t say another word until they’re out of the shop.

“First try!” Mae exclaims enthusiastically. The rain has lightened slightly, but the streets are just as crowded as they were ten minutes ago. “Can we get ice cream as a treat?”

“It’s a matter of luck, not skill,” Amy says, although it’s hard to cast too much doubt on Mae’s obvious delight without feeling like a villain. “We can stop for some ice cream if you promise to behave in the apothecary. They keep vipers in the back to milk their venom, and I don’t want you starting a riot.”

Mae huffs. “Fine. But I hope they give them plenty of space. It’s completely barbaric to keep a viper cooped up in some dark little box-,”

The vipers are contained in a large, warm enclosure in the back of the apothecary, not a dark little box. Amy does the shopping quickly and efficiently, keeping one eye on Mae all the while, watches her outline lit by the light of the glass as she stretches up on her tiptoes. One of the vipers has extended the length of its coils to press its head to the glass. If Mae is speaking to them, she must be whispering under her breath- Amy doesn’t hear anything. 

The first time she realized what Mae could do, she’d stepped outside to find a five year old Mae on the terrace, chattering happily to a whip snake that she’d enticed into her lap. Amy had only stopped herself from screaming by clapping a hand over her mouth at the last instant, and then had to spend nearly ten minutes convincing Mae to send the snake back outside before Teddy or Patsy happened to come outside for a smoke.

She’s told herself that it’s irrational to feel unease or discomfort with it. Being a parselmouth was never the crux of what was wrong with Tom. He never saw the snakes he spoke with as friends- they were tools, just like every other living thing around him. Mae is different. She genuinely cares. Maybe she could become a magizoologist. That sounds like a nice, safe career path- or as safe as any magical career path is liable to be. 

When Amy was in school she knew classmates who rolled their eyes at the idea of going into healing, thought it was a soft, safe, almost womanly sort of magical art, lacking intellectual rigor and dooming oneself to a lifetime of tending to the morons who regularly landed themselves in St. Mungo’s for botching a simple transfiguration spell or who walked straight into a curse trap. 

Well, she’s got her share of scars proving otherwise, not that she’s one to bandy stories about them. What she would like for Mae, most of all, is a lifetime free of scars. What she would really like for her is a shortage of painful memories or deep regrets. The world is a better place now than it was when Amy was born. It has to be. She just has to keep telling herself that it has to be, and maybe it will come true. Surely they’ve all learned something, muggles and wizards, from the wars. Truthfully, she has more faith in muggles to make progress. When you’ve got magic, it’s easier to cover up the cracks and pretend things are really improving when they’re not. Muggles don’t have the luxuries of enchantments or glamours. What you see is what you get. 

Mercifully, Florean’s is still open by the time they’re done in the apothecary. It’s a short walk to the ice cream parlor, but they have to go past the main entrance to Knockturn Alley to do so, and Amy crosses the street so they’ll be walking on the opposite side well beforehand, so Mae won’t notice her sudden aversion to the left side of the street. She’s not sure if they’ve been followed since they came to Diagon tonight or not. She’s trying to reassure herself that it’s going to happen sooner or later, and the best thing she can do is keep calm and carry on as normal. She is not going to live in fear. She is not going to bring Mae up that way. That’s why she came back in the first place. Better here, on old, familiar ground, then on some foreign street or in some unknown apartment block, a continent away. 

The ice cream parlor is bright and cheery, although Mae wrinkles her nose at the song playing on the radio, some bouncy witch’s best imitation of muggle bubblegum pop, and most of the tables and booths are occupied by teenagers with nothing better to do on a rainy Tuesday night in August. Amy notices a few young couples, some holding hands and speaking in low voices, others far more casual, slurping their milkshakes or messing around with their straws and wrappers. 

She tries and fails not to think about the last time she was here, right before they went back for their seventh year. She was knee deep in lies and he was up to his chest in delusions of grandeur, but they’d put it aside and placed their orders and probably had sat in one of the minty green booths or at one of the little folding tables outside. Her teeth ache like she still had a frozen spoon lodged between them, and he was in a good mood because he’d quite literally just gotten away with murder, and afterwards they’d probably taken one of the back streets to avoid being seen by anyone either of them knew, and they wouldn’t have kissed because he was trying to be a gentleman, and give her time, but she would have hated herself for how readily she fell back into feeling at ease with him, how she could possibly still crave someone’s attention and affection even when she’d learned to loathe them.

Amy gets herself an ice cream soda in a fit of lost youth, and watches Mae devour a candy-coated monstrosity of an ice cream sundae, slathered in toppings and leaking over the sides of the dish. If her daughter inherited anything from her, it must have been her sweet tooth. Mae is a very particular, careful eater when it comes to desserts, slowly scraping the spoon around the edges of the bowl over and over again, intent on getting every last drop. The scraping noise reminds Amy of something else, a fork going round and round an empty dinner plate, and before that, a spoon in a teacup, moving smoothly around the porcelain, in the middle of a crowded pub, while Tom carefully probed at the edges of her mind.

That was on her invitation. That was when he was trying to be careful, to be gentle, to not upset her, when he was trying to teach her how to block out an influence. She has no idea how well those exercises will hold up were she to be confronted with him actively attempting to invade her thoughts and memories. She’s read up on legilimency, and occlumency. If his talent for mind magic has increased even minutely- her teeth chatter from brain freeze, and she comes back to herself as Mae wipes at her mouth with a napkin, then reaches for the newspaper on the table between them. Mae likes to do the crosswords.

Amy isn’t sure whether she ought to be relieved that Mae has little interest in the political headlines or not. 

It’s late indeed by the time they get back to Hogsmeade. Amy allows herself to relax in the comfortable mundanity of the sleepy little village, and does not scold when Mae runs up the street, slipping over wet cobblestones. Amy immediately regrets this when she sees Mae barrel straight into a group of people leaving the Hog’s Head; cursing under her breath, she jogs up to them, flushed in embarrassment, where her daughter is not. “I am so sorry- Mae, apologize-,”

“How was I supposed to know they were going to open the door right then?” Mae demands indignantly. “I’m not a seer-,”

“Mae,” Amy says through her teeth, before she recognizes one of the couples, or at least half of it. She hasn’t seen the woman in years, never-mind spoken to her, but she does know who her coworkers will be, and for the past three years, Defence Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts has been the purvey of acclaimed former professional duelist and defensive magic prodigy, June Carmody. She was the pride of the Dueling Club when Amy was in school, and Amy still remembers what she looked like as a teenage girl; that head of wild auburn hair and long, coltish limbs. 

“Professor Carmody-,” she fumbles the introduction like a quaffle, only for June to take her hand in a firm, only painful grip, give it one perfunctory shake, eyebrows arched. “Please, Amy- you don’t mind, do you? We’re going to be working together, might as well use our Christian names. And is this your…” She trails off, and the man who must be her husband smiles somewhat stiltedly at Mae, who finally manages to mutter-

“Sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going, Mrs- I mean, Professor-,”

“Carmody,” June says patiently, adjusting the collar of her emerald green coat, which was clearly designed to match the green and white patterned dress underneath to a tee. Amy was only a second year when June was a seventh year, but she does remember her being known for being a very fashionable dresser. 

Her reddish brown hair has been chopped into a shaggy, tousled Italian cut, her lipstick is a vivid shade of crimson, and the white scar that fish-hooks under her left eye looks old but brutal. Someone made a good attempt at taking that eye out, whether it was with a wand or a knife. “I’ll be one of your instructors when the term starts up- Mae, was it? This is Art, my husband-,”

Art reaches around his wife to shake Amy’s hand. He’s almost shockingly dull in appearance compared to his striking wife; a thin, balding man with deep blue eyes and a prematurely lined face. His clothing is much more subdued as well, faded and worn in a sort of bumbling academic look. “Arthur Norbrook.”

Amy is momentarily confused by the discrepancy there. “You’re… you kept your maiden name,” she realizes belatedly, then smiles to cover up any awkwardness. “Oh, of course-,” It’d be unthinkable for a muggle woman, but none of them are muggles here, are they?

“It just made things more convenient, what with the dueling side of things. I was still in the circuit when he popped the question.” June ruffles through her handbag, produces a small compact, and examines her reflection, then snaps it shut. “Anyways, some first meeting, but what can you do? Listen, we live… how many streets over?”

“Two,” Art supplies, looking slightly nonplussed at how Mae’s gaze is darting between the two of them in open curiosity. “Right here in the village, great housing prices, if you hadn’t noticed…” He trails off as his wife rolls her eyes at him, then turns back to Amy.

“If you want to drop in any time, feel free, yeah? Merlin knows I’m not doing much but working on lesson plans this time of year, and he’s off at the Ministry every day-,” she nudges Arthur with an elbow.

“Office of Improper Use of Magic,” he supplies with a faint smile.

Right. He works directly under Tom. Her luck’s been on a proper roll lately, hasn’t it?

“That must be interesting work,” Amy says, then realizes the poor man likely still has no idea who she is, and as much as she wants to be on her way, she can’t be that rude- “Amy Benson, sorry, I’m not sure if we’ve ever met, I just took the Potions position. And this is Mae,” she fights to keep her tone bright and unchanging, “my daughter, she’ll be starting next month. She’s very excited.”

“I got my wand today,” Mae informs them, helpfully. 

“Spiffy,” June says, in a tone that makes it difficult to tell whether or not she’s being genuine or sarcastic. “We’ll let you get on with your night- we just did a few rounds of drinks with some friends, I’m knackered. I’ll be seeing you soon, of course.”

“Of course,” Amy says, stepping out of the way so they can walk by, thinking that was perhaps the worst way she could have met a fellow professor and her spouse. She’s not sure if the headache is stress related or a side effect of the ice cream soda. As soon as they’re out of earshot, she rounds on Mae, who tries and fails to look guilty. “Honestly, Mae- you do realize that’s someone I’ll be working with? What do you think they thought, seeing you go careening down the street, smashing into people-,”

“They probably thought I was a really fast runner,” Mae dodges her swat easily, then takes one of the brown paper bags from the apothecary as a means of apology, however mild. Amy carefully lets them into the little cottage, then locks the door behind them. She hasn’t warded Mae’s bedroom here, as she always had on Gibraltar- it’s not worth it when Mae will be sleeping in an entirely different bed in just a few weeks. But that doesn’t stop the small bubble of anxiety in her chest whenever she sees Mae go racing up the narrow stairwell, flipping on lights, floorboards creaking underfoot. Last night Mae got up at two in the morning for a glass of water, and Amy shot up in bed in a cold sweat, hearing someone rustling around in the kitchen, only to be consoled by the familiar sound of Mae's muffled cursing when fumbled the glass and dropped it into the sink with a dull clatter. 

She wishes she hadn’t burned that note. She wishes she still had that familiar old wardrobe in her office back home, even if her office inside Hogwarts is much more secure. But there’s no use crying over spilled milk. While she listens to the distant sounds of Mae getting ready for bed, Amy unpacks the shopping bags, changes out of her own damp clothes, then sits down at the kitchen table to pour over her lesson plans. Never-mind that she feels wildly unqualified for this position. Never-mind that MESP probably laughed themselves silly when they realized Dippet had harangued her into applying. She just needs to focus on the matter at hand. 

Eventually Mae comes back downstairs to say goodnight, although she swipes a small sip of Amy’s tea beforehand. “Don’t stay up reading too late,” Amy says distractedly, without looking up from her scattered papers and the scratching of her pen. “You’ll strain your eyes with that torch of yours.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Mae intones with great irreverence, before she sloppily kisses her on the cheek. “Don’t let the pixies bite.”

“I’ll try.” Amy hears her go stomping back up the stairs, humming tunelessly, and then all is quiet aside from the distant bark of a dog a few streets away. At some point, close to midnight, she finally looks up from her notes only to almost give herself a heart attack because she mistook the mop propped up against the back door for a human head. 

She dumps the remainder of her tea in the sink and tosses the bag in the bin, then stands there for a moment, blinking tiredly under the dim light, before she reaches up on her tiptoes to turn it off. The wind goes rushing along the sides of the cottage, rattling the back door however briefly, and Amy burrows into her pullover for a moment, then heads for the stairwell, trying to settle the lingering chill that has taken up residence under her skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I felt like I couldn't *not* do an introduction to Diagon Alley chapter in an HP fic. The next chapter should cover the start of the term and a general who's who of the current staff and students of Hogwarts.
> 
> 1\. There's obviously a lot of parallels between this chapter and chapter 4 of BW, not just the rainy weather they share. Amy is very much 'in her head' for most of this chapter, mostly because she's trying to shield Mae from what she's really feeling, as well as her paranoia at plunging back into the British wizarding world. At the same time, she doesn't want her fear to control their life, so she's trying to still give Mae a 'normal' school experience- which includes getting her wand.
> 
> 2\. Martinmas aka St. Martin's Day aka Old Halloween is November 11th. Traditionally people would believe there was a brief warm spell around Martinmas before winter began in earnest. In the US this is sometimes known as an 'Indian Summer'. It's also a time period when the preparations for winter would be concluding in farming communities; so the wine would be ready and the cattle and geese would be slaughtered. There's an old English saying: "His Martinmas will come as it does to every hog" which basically means 'everyone will get their comeuppance' or 'he'll get his'. I figured this would be a suitable date for a matter of big political/magical importance. 
> 
> 3\. Ollivander did Amy a big favor by not mentioning exactly who he last sold a phoenix feather wand to. Then again, Ollivander enjoys being pretty cryptic, so that's not so shocking. 
> 
> 4\. June Carmody had a very brief cameo in chapter 12 of BW, where we saw her, as a Slytherin seventh year, win a duel against a particularly cocky Gryffindor. She is now the professor of DADA at Hogwarts, after a highly successful professional dueling career overseas. Her husband happens to work in the same Ministry Office as Tom, to Amy's dismay. We'll be seeing the other professors, both old and new, next chapter. 
> 
> 5\. If you know the musical My Fair Lady, you know what song the title of this chapter references.


	5. Mae II

HOGSMEADE, SEPTEMBER 1957

In a fit of pique, Mae sleeps in to an outrageously late extent, only deigning to finally emerge from her cocoon of sheets when it nears ten o’clock in the morning. She can hear Mum stomping around angrily downstairs, and dishes clattering in the sink, but really, can you blame Mae? This is a very just reaction to being denied half of the bloody induction into Hogwarts. _No, Mae, you can’t take the train, don’t be ridiculous. I am not bringing you all the way down to London just so you can ride the rail lines back up here. Find something else to do today. Organize your luggage_. 

Organize her luggage- like hell! She hopes Mum trips over it! Why should Mae have to miss out on King’s Cross and the train ride, just because Mum doesn’t feel like Flooing into the Leaky Cauldron and then catching a cab to King’s Cross from there. Sure, maybe she has some important meetings up at the castle and things to do before the welcome feast tonight, but how is that Mae’s problem? What matters is that every other student will be on the Hogwarts Express today, enjoying hours and hours free of nosy mothers, stuffing their faces with sweets and exchanging gossip and class secrets, and she will be sitting here, twiddling her thumbs, waiting for the bloody train to pull into the station at half past six. 

It’s completely outrageous. Mae ordinarily has little issue with standing out, but this is different. Doesn’t she have a right to the same experience as everyone else? Mum says she’s being very melodramatic, that she’ll get to take the boats across the lake just like the other first years, that she’ll be sorted just like everyone else, and that there will be plenty of time to catch up and make friends during the feast, but Mae doesn’t see it that way. Easy for her to say; she rode the train back and forth all seven years, didn’t she? 

Now Mae is going to be that strange girl whose mum is a professor and who didn’t ride the train with everyone else. She’ll be the odd interloper at the station, awkwardly trying to insert herself into conversation hours and hours after everyone else has already made their little friend groups. Her only hope will be the other outcasts who’ve just spent half the day sitting in a compartment by themselves, staring mournfully out the window and watching the sun set. 

There has to be something really wrong with you, she thinks critically, if you’ve just managed to go hours and hours on a train without any social interaction besides the lady who sells sweets. And the sweets! She’s going to have to eat a disgustingly healthy lunch and have her tea by herself in the dim little kitchen while everyone else is stuffing their fat little faces full of sugary treats, loving every minute of it. The rat bastards. 

“You know,” she informed Mum waspishly last night, “I read a study about how people form their closest-,” she’d had to concentrate to enunciate correctly, “emotional attachments with the people they eat meals with. You’re depriving me. You’re neglecting my….” she’d drummed her fork on the table, trying to think of the phrase, before alighting upon it. “My social needs. I need to bond with a group of peers as soon as possible. Otherwise I could become maladaptive.”

“Maladjusted.” Mum had replied, without looking up from a letter from Aunt Ruby. “The word you’re looking for is maladjusted. I think you’ll survive.”

“Fine,” Mae had sighed with great foreboding gusto. “When I’ve become an arsonist or murderer because of this, you’ll be really sorry.” She’d stabbed at her pork as if to illustrate that frightening possibility. 

Mum had calmly sipped at her glass of wine instead of looking aghast or concerned. 

Mae had even gone so far as to secret away a small amount of Floo powder- she’d wake up at dawn on September first, she’d convinced herself, sneak downstairs, Floo into London, and then Mum wouldn’t have time to stop her, and why bother, anyways, she’d be nearly to the train station by then- but of course Mum had found it hidden in her nightstand while tidying up her room, and gone completely mad, shouting so loudly Mae bets Professor Carmody and her husband probably heard them, two bloody streets away.

Something something ‘how dare you’ something something ‘what were you thinking’ something something ‘do you have any idea how dangerous’ something something ‘you are an eleven year old little girl’ something something ‘you have no idea what kind of terrible people are out there’ something something ‘if you ever- and I mean ever- try a stunt like this again’ and so on and so forth… Mae didn’t really remember most of it, because in her annoyance at being found out, her magic had triggered a pleasant rumbly buzzing sound, like bumblebees, in her ears, and so much of the effect of Mum’s shouting fit had been very much muted. 

And so, foiled and rebuked at every turn, Mae finally comes downstairs to eat something with her hair in disarray, her pyjamas a rumpled mess, and her feet bare and cold. Mum gives her an ‘I’m still very disappointed and angry with you’ look. She’s wearing more makeup than usual, and a new silk scarf ties back her ponytail. Someone wants to make a good impression. Mae sniffs haughtily in return, sidles into a seat, and folds her arms across her chest. “Am I going to get any breakfast, or are you starving me too, now?” 

Mum flicks her wand like a backhand, and a plate of lukewarm eggs and toast goes flying from the kitchen counter and skitters to a halt in front of Mae. “You’re acting like a brat.”

“You’re treating me like a prisoner,” Mae snaps back. “I never ask for anything, all I want, all I _ever_ asked you for was to take the train-,”

“You’d ask me for the moon and the stars if you thought I could get them for you,” Mum snorts, sipping her tea and flipping angrily through the newspaper. “You wanted to come here? Well, here we are, and this is how it’s going to be. I have a job, Mae. Responsibilities. Just like back home-,”

Mae huffs in between bites of toast. “Don’t be so dramatic,” she imitates Mum almost perfectly. “I don’t see you rushing off-,”

“Because I wanted to be sure you weren’t going to do anything stupid before I left!” Mum checks her watch. “I’m already running late, again-,”

“Then _go_ already!” Mae heaps some pepper onto her eggs, and stirs them bitterly. “Cripes. Can’t I eat in peace?”

“Look at me,” Mum says in her ‘do not push me another inch, little girl’ voice, and Mae reluctantly looks up. “You should spend the rest of today getting your things together, and making sure you’re not missing any of your textbooks. If you want to go out and walk around the village, or sit by the lake and read, that’s fine. But you are to stay here. Understood? No trying to summon the Knight Bus, no wandering off into the forest- here. In Hogsmeade. I’ll be back for tea later, and then you can get changed into your uniform and I’ll walk you down to the station to meet the others.”

“Don’t bother,” Mae says acidly in response, delighting in how grown up she sounds, like a young woman, not a child, and ignoring the look of hurt that flashes across her mother’s open face. “I don’t need your help with anything, I’m not a baby. I’ll see you at the feast. Are you sure you don’t want to take my wand, too, or lock me in the cellar so no one sees me? Wouldn’t want to embarrass you!”

Mum blanches and reddens in the span of ten seconds. “You don’t embarrass me, that’s not- I just want you to be sensible. You’re really not missing out on much. I promise you, no one will care whether you were on the train or not- they won’t even notice, there’ll be so many first years. But you can’t- you can’t just think you’re going to go off by yourself like that. Flooing into London? I don’t care if it’s magical or muggle, it’s not safe. You’re a child. You don’t understand what kind of-,”

“Well, if everything is so dangerous and horrible, maybe you shouldn’t have brought me here in the first place,” Mae snaps. These eggs are terrible. Mum probably ruined them on purpose. “That’s all you ever do, go on about how we need to be careful. It’s so stupid. You’re a witch, aren’t you? So am I. They should be scared of us, not the other way around.”

“Just because you have a gift, doesn’t mean you’re invincible,” Mum says tightly. “I’d rather you not learn that the hard way.” She picks up her coat from the chair it was draped over, takes up her hat as well. “But if you don’t want me to come back down before the feast, that’s fine. Just keep track of the time. And please keep track of your uniform- you don’t want to get in trouble on your first day.”

“Already have,” Mae mutters, but does not resist Mum’s kiss to the forehead, even if she doesn’t return it. “Bye.” She listens to her hurry outside, closing the door with a thump behind her, and then the click of her heels fading on the cobblestones.

When she’s done picking at her breakfast, she puts the dishes in the sink and tries to listen to the radio over the running of the water, but the muggle radio picks up nothing but static here, and Mum hasn’t bought them a magical one yet. When she’s done washing up she reluctantly sweeps the kitchen floor as well, shooing away a stray cat prowling around the back stoop with the broom, before finally trudging back upstairs to brush her teeth and change. 

She might as well enjoy wearing trousers while she still can. Mum’s warned her that she can’t go to class wearing anything but a skirt and properly tucked in blouse under her robes, or her blazer, which is slightly too baggy in the shoulders. She supposes she should be grateful they’re not making all the girls wear pinafores and keep their hair in prissy little braids with big ribbons, at this rate. 

For now she slouches about in her blue jeans and an old pale green jumper that used to be Mum’s. The cottage here isn’t really that much smaller or more cramped than their flat above the clinic, but somehow it still feels more boxy and isolated, a muffled little cage. Maybe it’s just the complete lack of traffic or the distant cries of gulls or people moving on the streets below. Hogsmeade is almost deathly silent on a day like this. She’s tempted to go bolting outside, but she knows the sight of the castle looming in the distance up in the hills will just irritate her, knowing Mum’s up there, fussing about with the other teachers, while Mae’s stuck down here, a tiny little ant. 

She turns to the few boxes that have been left in the small sitting room instead; things Mum has no intention of bringing up to the castle, but hasn’t had time to properly store here yet, either. Mae has little interest in most of it; old books and papers, clothes that need to be donated or tossed, random trinkets and curiosities, heaps of magazines and healing journals, until she finally finds what she was really looking for. They’re not the sort of people that have a neatly ordered scrapbook, and Mum’s never been all that sentimental to keep tons of old pictures lying around, but there is a single shoebox full of childhood memories.

When Mae was little she would bounce up and down on Mum’s knee while they looked over them, but now she’s eleven, and can hardly admit to ever- well, missing any of that. It’s not like she wants to be some teeny five year old again, clutching Mummy’s hand and showing off her loose teeth. She’s growing up. She likes growing up. It means people have to take you seriously. It means they don’t treat you like you’re fragile or made of glass. No way does she want to be some little kid again, playing with blocks or dolls on the floor while Mum escorted patients in and out of the exam room. 

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to look back, sometimes.

There’s barely any photos of her from when she was a baby. There’s one of Mum holding her, blinking tiredly at the camera while sitting rigid in a rocking chair, from when Mae must have been only a few weeks old. Mum doesn’t look all that pleased, although her expression momentarily softens whenever she glances down at the infant Mae sleeping peacefully in her arms, and every so often she summons up a wan smile at the viewer, as if prompted by an unseen photographer. Her hair is pulled back from her face and her eyes look swollen. She doesn’t look like anyone’s mother; she looks like a teenaged girl. She looks scared. It must have been taken outside on the clinic’s porch; a sunset a million moments in the past casts long shadows on the stone wall behind her.

Maybe the first one where they both look properly happy is from much later; Mae’s much bigger, at least a year old, sitting in the bath tub and beaming up at the camera, and every so often Mum pokes her head into the frame and splashes her with water or blows bubbles at her with her wand. Mae reaches chubby little hands up to grab at them, or splashes Mum back, giggling, or tries to stand up in the tub before toppling back onto her bum. At one point Mum sits down on the edge of the bath and tilts her head just so, grinning at the camera she must be holding up above them with one arm. The toddler Mae, annoyed at the loss of attention, pats at her thigh insistently until Mum glances back down and splashes her again.

There’s plenty more of Mae as a small child; one of her when she just learned how to walk, toddling down the hallway towards the camera, face set in determination, and one of her on tricycle on some sidewalk, Mum hunched over pushing her along, cheering, and one of her aged three or four, dressed up for some Christmas party, dark hair covered in tinsel and face slathered in glittery paint. Mum is wearing a God-awful jumper with snowflakes on it, Mae balanced on her hip, and they are spinning around in a circle, bopping to silent music underneath a clump of mistletoe. 

Then she is six or seven, climbing a tree, feet scrabbling at the bark as she hoists herself up, then she is perhaps nine, playing a clapping game with Mum while they both sit on the stairs, heads bent together like they were both little kids, then she is almost her age now, ten, at her second to last birthday party, the big double digits, posing with Mum in front of a very ugly but very delicious cake. They’re wearing matching sundresses, something Mae would never be caught dead in now, and the wind is tugging at Mum’s oversized straw hat, and Mae is wearing a feeble flower crown of candytuft and jasmine, and then at someone’s urging, bends down to blow out the sputtering candles on her cake. 

Mum claps her hands together, cheering, and the wind knocks her hat off her head. Mae pauses mid-licking the frosting off one of the candles to laugh at her, sticking out her tongue. Mum catches the hat off-camera, then comes back into the frame, hands her the knife to cut the cake with a warning look, which Mae promptly ignores, stabbing it into the center of the cake like a pirate pinning a treasure map to the table. 

Her last birthday, this past year, she and Mum had a proper fight over something, Mae can’t recall what. There was cake and a few gifts but no banners or balloons, and Mae went off to see a double feature afterwards with Teddy while Mum and Patsy stayed behind to clean up. She shoves the sun-damaged photographs back into a semi-neat pile, not wanting to look at them anymore. She’s just being stupid. She’ll see Mum practically every day all the same, only she’ll be a professor, not just her mother, and people will probably poke fun, but Mae will just learn some jinxes and put a quick end to that. 

Anyways, Mum always caves first. Always. She can never stay angry for very long, Mae always wins when it comes to holding grudges. Inevitably Mum will apologize, or back down, or make nice by taking her out to the beach or to go to some book shop or to get ice cream. Mae’s bets it’s because she was a Hufflepuff. They’re supposed to be very forgiving, it’s practically a requirement. Mae has no such intentions. She doesn’t much care what ‘house’ she ends up in, so long as she’s not surrounded by people she can’t stand. And she’d rather not have to live in the dungeons. 

But she’s not done yet. She shoves her hand in the now seemingly empty shoe-box, wedging her nails into the corner of the bottom of it, then peels up the cardboard, because that’s not really the bottom at all. Mae found this out ages and ages ago, she’s just never felt tempted to mess with it again. Now she is, and not just because she’s angry with Mum or bored to death. The dog tags slot neatly into her palm. Mae holds them up to the light, squinting as she’s done a dozen times before, as if they could ever change. These aren’t magic; there’s no enchantment or curse waiting to be unlocked here. 

SHELBY FW. Then some number. RC. RAF. Mae knows RC must be Roman Catholic, and RAF has to be Royal Air Force. She doesn’t know the initials, though. Maybe Frank or Fred. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not like she’d have called him by his first name, had she ever gotten the chance to know him. They’re on an old leather bootlace. After a moment’s hesitation, Mae presses the tags to her lips in a mimic of a kiss, then knots the bootlace around her neck, tucking it under her jumper. The small metal discs are cold against her chest. 

He was a muggle. He wouldn’t know the first thing about Hogwarts. Would he even care to know? She smooths down the false bottom of the shoe box, shoves the pictures back into it, and jumps up, brushing off her jeans. It doesn’t matter. He’s dead. He never even got to see her face, or she his. He’s dead and he’s never coming home to anyone, let alone her, and that’s that. It’s not as though she never thinks of him. Mum doesn’t have any pictures, but she’s showed Mae a drawing, once. He was sitting up in a cot, shoulders hunched against the dark wall behind him. 

The drawing was just a quick pencil sketch, smeared with haste and age, all smudgy and blurred, but he had a head of curly, dark hair and a narrow face. Mae has examined her own in the mirror, trying to think of similarities. She got his hair color, if not the curls. Her face isn’t very long, but maybe it will be when she’s a grown up. He wasn’t smiling in the drawing; he looked more pensive than anything else, but he had kind, hooded eyes. 

She thinks maybe he would have liked her. Most everyone likes her; Mum says it’s because she has heaps of ‘natural charm and beauty’. Mum is usually being a little sarcastic when she says it, but not completely. Maybe FW Shelby would have liked her. Maybe if he hadn’t died, him and Mum could have gotten married in a little church or a court house and they could have gone back to live with his people, wherever they were, and Mae could have had siblings and a proper house, not a tiny flat, and all the snakes in the garden out back to play with. 

He got sick. If he’d have been a wizard that never would have happened. Wizards don’t usually get muggle diseases, although Mum says that’s a ‘vast over-exaggeration and a typical misunderstanding of the limitations of muggle medicine when compared to our ability to diagnose and treat chronic conditions-’... Well, she’d say something along those lines, citing one of the healing journals she subscribes to, and Mae would roll her eyes back up into her head and make some excuse to be dismissed from the dinner table. 

Anyways, she supposes most of the parts of not having a father are good. Fathers yell and come home grumpy from work, it’s a known fact. They make stupid jokes that really aren’t that funny and you have to laugh at them or else they get all sulky. They bark things like ‘listen to your mother, young lady’ or snap their belts threateningly at you, even if they never intend to actually hit you. They’re crummy at cooking and cleaning because they never had to learn how, so if your mum isn’t home they’re completely useless and you’ll have to eat sandwiches for dinner. They make mothers irritated and snappy and then they go run off to hide and let you bear the brunt of the impending explosion. 

Mae has learned all this from books and other children, so she knows it to be absolutely true. Besides, some fathers are real shits. They get drunk and throw things or give you the back of their hand or call your mum nasty names and push her around. Granted, once a rough looking wizard who came to the clinic holding up a friend who kept vomiting up fur and bones started shouting at Mum, and when she told him he could fuck off and let her do her work, he tried to give her a smack, the way you might a dog. 

Mum caught his hand with hers while she was rifling through one of the big metal filing cabinets, jerked his hand down towards her, and then slammed the metal drawer shut on it, opened it again while he screamed, and slammed it once more. Then Teddy came running out from the office and ‘escorted’ him out while he was screaming in pain, and Mae got in trouble because she started giggling while watching from the stairs. As if it was her fault that it was funny to see someone’s fingers bend back like that. 

As if the universe heard her think that, she almost catches her fingers on the heavy front door as she closes it behind her, stepping outside into the warm sunshine. But even the warm sunshine here vanishes every time a cloud passes overhead, and when the wind picks up it feels like the middle of winter. She didn’t put on a coat, something Mum would be annoyed with if she were here, but Mae’s too stubborn to dart back inside the house now that she’s already locked the door. 

Mum’s reminded her a million times over the past few weeks. If you’re going out, lock the door. If you’re home alone, lock the door. Be back inside by dinner time. Don’t loiter around on the front stoop. Don’t hang around the shops unless you’re buying something. Don’t talk to strangers unless there’s an emergency. That’s about the stupidest thing Mae’s ever heard. If there was really something wrong, why would she run up to someone she doesn’t know for help? Isn’t the point to get to know people, so that way if she needs help, she has friends?

Besides, it’s not as if Hogsmeade has ‘strangers’. It’s a tiny magical village. When school isn’t in session there’s maybe three hundred residents, maximum. Most of them are older witches and wizards; this place doesn’t have much appeal for families with young children. She’s seen the occasional tourist wandering through, but less and less as September 1st has drawn closer. Apparently the forest is quite popular with magizoologists and all sorts of researchers, but Mae has yet to see any groups of people coming or going. Maybe they only slink in and out at night. 

Last week when she had a few hours to herself she wandered over to the edge of the woods and just walked back and forth, peering into the dark treeline, but nervy as she is, she wasn’t nervy enough to go exploring. Mae’s not dumb; she hasn’t got a map or anything, and if she got lost and got herself eaten by something Mum would probably find some way to bring her back to life- just so she could kill her herself. For all that Mum says Mae is reckless, it’s not as if she never thinks things through. She does. She just thinks a lot faster than most people. Mum would also say that makes her conceited, always thinking she knows best. 

Maybe a little. But Mae’s pretty sure where she gets that from. Once Mum decides something, that’s it. No changing her mind. Isn’t that just as pig-headed? Like coming here. It’s not that Mae regrets it- this is what she wanted, after all. To go to Hogwarts and be here and be with everyone else and be a proper witch. Hogwarts is the best magical school in Europe, everyone knows that, no matter what the Russians or the French say. This is where Mum went, and she’s got a really decent witch. She’d probably be better if she took one of those hospital posts she got offered back when Mae was little, but Mum said those sort of jobs weren’t for women who had kids to raise. 

Mae reaches the end of the quiet lane, then turns a sharp left, angling for the dark gleam of the lakeshore in the distance, beyond the neat little lines of stone cottages. Sometimes she wonders if Mum regrets having her. Not that Mum doesn’t love her- Mae knows she does, of course. You have to love your kid, that’s the trouble. You have one and then you’re stuck with it, right? Mae sometimes tries to imagine having a baby. Not being pregnant- although wizards are less fussy about that kind of thing than muggles- muggles don’t even like to see pregnant woman out and about, they think it’s improper- but having to take care of some tiny, screechy little thing that may or may not look like her.

She thinks she’d probably be tempted to put it in a basket and float it down a river. Or leave it out for the faeries. 

Do merfolk take human babies? As snacks, maybe. Mae can see a few, sunning themselves on the rocks by the lakeshore, enjoying the peace and quiet before the students come flooding in. They can’t really stay out of the water for long, so every few moments one or the other rolls back in with a quiet splash, like seals. These are selkies, technically, so she supposes that makes sense. Mae waves when she gets closer, to be polite. The selkies eye her as she draws closer, although she’s careful to stay far back on the shore. Mum warned her that they usually didn’t mean humans any harm, but that didn’t mean they wanted her to run over and get too comfortable. 

“They’re not animals,” she said. “But they’re not human, either. They have their own ways, and they have good reason not to want us around them. Wizards and witches haven’t been kind to them.”

As far as Mae could tell, most of magical history does not consist of wizards and witches being ‘kind’ to anyone. She sits down cross-legged on the grass, watching their long, silver tails shine in the sunlight. One of the younger merfolk is looking at her; she thinks it might be a boy, although his hair is an inky green-black spool that drips down his grey-toned back. It looks like an oil slick. When he swivels his head to look her way, his eyes are yellow as a cat’s, slightly bulbous, unblinking because he has no eyelids. Mae holds up a hand in greeting. He says something, to one of the other merpeople, maybe his mother or father, then flips himself off the rock and into the water. 

Mae watches in fascination as he disappears beneath the black surface without so much as a ripple betraying his whereabouts, then pops up again a moment later in the shallows, blinking through his hair at her. He rasps Mermish, and she shrugs, points to her human lips. He makes another sound that seems more like gravelly laughter, and flicks his tail, which must be at least five feet long. The merfolk are big, much taller than the average human, which is mostly why you don’t want to tick them off, Mae assumes. They’re very strong and very fast and their teeth are like razors. She imagines they must scare the bejeezus out of muggles, if they ever glimpse them. They look like something out of the Black Lagoon. 

Mae applauds when he splashes his tail hard enough to create a shower of sprinkling water that does mist over her. “ _I’m not coming in_ ,” she tells him, since he seems hopeful for a playmate- or plaything. They must get very bored, confined to this one lake, although maybe they could swim upstream to one of the rivers every so often. She’s speaking Parseltongue, on the off chance he can understand that. “ _I don’t have gills_.” He seems to at least register her dryly amused tone and the way she touches the sides of her neck. 

The merchild cocks his head as if to say ‘so what?’ and she snorts in amusement. Giving up on her, he wriggles his tail and pushes himself, like a giant water snake, back into the deeper water. He vanishes back into the depths for a few minutes, until she spots him back near the rocks, where a bird has landed. When he shoots back up out of the water, he doesn’t even raise his thin, sinewy arms, just keeps them locked at his sides and takes the bird into his unhinged, open jaws in one savage bite. There’s a brief flapping of wings and a great splash, then nothing. Mae stands up, brushing off her jeans- show’s over. He surfaces with a mossy green-haired girl that might be a sibling a little while later, white feathers caught in her hair. Someone decided to share their snack. 

For most of the rest of the day she wanders about Hogsmeade, moving from shop to shop, inspecting wares as if she really intends to buy anything, leaving when she gets suspicious looks. She kicks an abandoned ball around a narrow alleyway, delighting it the sound it makes as it bounces off the brick walls, and wanders up and down the hillside, letting the long yellowish green grass lick at her legs and bare hands. She skips stones on the far side of the lake, then finds an abandoned rope swing a student must have set up. The rope itself has clearly seen better days, but Mae is undeterred; she hooks her left foot in the noose at the bottom and gets a running start, then kicks off the ground, swinging out over the lake for a few perilous feet, then back again, over and over.

She goes back to the cottage to make herself lunch and plays with her wand while she eats her sandwich at the kitchen table, still getting an excited flurry in her chest every time she manages to create sparks. Mostly they are red or green, but once she got gold. “ _Lumos_ ,” she says, as she’s been doing whenever Mum isn’t around, and grins when her wand lights up obediently. “ _Nox. Lumos. Nox._ ” This hardly even counts as magic, and it’s not as if they’re going to throw her in jail for casting an incredibly minor spell in Hogsmeade. That’s not what the Trace is for. 

“ _Lumos maxima_ ,” she tries at one point, and the flash of golden light almost blinds her for a few moments.

She gets antsy as the day grows later. There’s only so much you can do around a tiny village by yourself. She can’t even people-watch out the window; nobody walks by. Mae goes through her suitcase and her leather satchel one more time, sings to herself when the radio once again fails to produce anything but static, and finally, around four o’clock, has tea by herself. She wonders if Mum might ignore what she said and still come back for it, but she doesn’t. Mae tells herself it doesn’t matter. She’s acting like a little kid. She’s eleven; that’s practically a teenager and way too old to be fussing about missing her mummy. The other kids are going to eat her alive if she keeps acting like a drip. 

She takes an especially long time to change into her uniform, mostly because she hates it, hates the stiff white blouse and the slightly baggy blazer and the stupid ugly black skirt that comes down far past her knees. She hates the stupid itchy knee socks and the too tight black patent leather shoes, she hates the way she looks in the mirror- hunched over under the weight of her satchel across her chest and her suitcase, her face pinched and drawn, the only distinguishable thing about her being her headband. The robes are even worse, because even if she wanted to wear them over casual clothes instead, she still wouldn’t be able to wear trousers underneath, or comfortable shoes. She prods the dog tags under her blouse; they're warm against her skin by now, and smell comfortingly of metal.

When she leaves the house at six o’clock, she drops her keys while trying to lock the door and curses loudly, under her breath, before finally getting it shut and stomping down the front stoop, across the stone path, out through the waist-high wooden gate, and down the street. She cuts past Professor Carmody’s house on her way to the station, and is surprised to see the lights on. She would have figured Professor Carmody was up at the castle with all the other teachers. Then she remembers about the husband, who probably just got home from work. Sure enough, Mr. Norbrook is on his front stoop, newspaper in hand. He glances up as he spots her, and waves. 

Mae waves back, forcing a smile, because Mum says there’s no need to take your bad mood out on other people, especially your neighbors. 

“Excited for the big night?” he calls out to her as she walks by. 

“Not really!” Mae hollers back, and she hears him chuckle behind her as she continues on down the lane. 

It’s not a very long walk to the station, but to her dismay she can see the train already pulling in as she nears it. Bloody thing came early! Who’s ever heard of a train coming early? She breaks into a dead run, swearing under her breath. At this rate, maybe she should have just waited for them down on the lake, since that’s where they’ll be taking the boats. She arrives near the platform just as the train comes to a halt, whistle screeching and steam whispering up into the cool night air. Mae glances around, makes out the nearby figure of a man she’s sure must the be the groundskeeper, and then the doors open and all hell breaks loose.

Mae once asked her mum exactly how many students there were at Hogwarts when she was there. Mum had estimated around eight or nine hundred, maybe closer to a thousand when she was graduating. Mae’s no stranger to crowds, but she’s used to roaming around a largely grown-up world, surrounded by people older and supposedly wiser. This is complete mayhem. She’s not about to try a headcount, but there are hundreds of kids pouring off this glossy red train, yelling and talking and laughing and pushing and shoving. A few students who must be prefects move through the crowd, trying to keep some sense of order, but it’s a lost cause. 

Mae watches as the massive crowd quickly separates into clumps of friends and classmates; the older kids all hang back under the platform awning, and she swears to Merlin she sees a few lighters being produced on the sly. Think they’re gonna get a quick smoke in before the feast, do they? A couple is passionately kissing up against one of the stone pillars; when a prefect shouts at them to knock it off, the girl makes a rude hand gesture and the boy snaps something in either German or Polish.

A gaggle of girls has taken over one of the benches, excitedly rambling about their summer holidays, swatting each other on the arm and squealing when one girl shows off her earrings. Two boys nearby are wide-eyed with fascination over another boy’s pet rat; it looks albino. A few of the really upper years are shoving through a crowd of terrified first years, shouting back and forth to each other about getting one of the better carriages. Mae moves towards what looks like some of the youngest students- Mum said they’d have to line up together- when someone bodily collides with her, almost knocking her off her feet. As it stands; she drops her suitcase- the cheap latch pops open, and a few things scatter to the cold ground.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mae says, almost relieved for the chance to get angry, since at least she won’t have to be as nervous if she’s mad. She rounds on the guilty party, but he’s already been caught by the ear by a tall, slightly gawky dark-haired girl with a prefect’s badge. 

“Get off!” The boy is also tall for his age, with narrow shoulders and a long face, a positively cruel crew-cut- any shorter and it would look like someone buzzed it a few months ago- but he’s not having much success breaking the girl’s grip, at least until he spits out, “It was an accident, okay, I’m sorry-,”

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to her, you dense little clod!”

Their Scottish accents sound remarkably similar, Mae looks between the two of them for another moment longer, noting the similar long faces and identical dark brown eyes, and then it hits her- “Is she your sister?” she blurts out. He’s getting hassled by his own sister, a prefect? And he must be a first year, otherwise he’d have house colors on his tie- This is priceless. 

“She’s a pain in the arse,” the boy says, or really, mutters, not that it does much good- his sister lets go of his ear, if only so she can deliver a stinging smack to the back of his head. “Jesus! I’ll have you written up for that, you can’t hit me-,”

“Go right ahead, and while we’re at it, I’ll inform Professor Dumbledore of your little stunt on the train-,”

“Christ! You’re acting like I killed someone, Minnie!”

“Do not call me that when we’re at school,” the girl snaps, thrusting a long finger in his face. 

He rolls his eyes, then glances at Mae. “Sorry I bumped you.” He doesn’t look terribly sorry.

“Pick up her things!” Minnie, the sister, prods him forward, just as someone starts shouting for the first years to gather around. “Hurry up, Malcolm, you don’t want to be left behind!”

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” he barks back at his sister, then with exaggerated slowness, reaches down to get Mae’s things. He picks up a faded paperback Nancy Drew, then snorts. “Really?”

“Oh, buzz off,” Mae snaps, holding her hand out for it.

“I’m sorry about him,” the prefect tells her, sighing. “He’s not usually this much of a pest, I swear.”

“I’m right here, Miss Prefect!” Malcolm shoots back at her, as he begrudgingly helps Mae shut her suitcase back up. “Why don’t you do something useful and take her luggage, then? We were supposed to leave it on the train,” he informs Mae in bemusement. “You didn’t have to lug it off with you-,”

“I wasn’t on the train, alright?” Mae heaves up her suitcase with a scowl, only for it to float out of her hands with a swish and a flick of Minnie’s wand. She didn’t even hear her cast the charm. 

“Oh,” the prefect looks quite interested now, her dark brown eyes alight with something. “Are you that professor’s daughter? The one replacing Slughorn?” She sticks out her free hand, and shakes Mae’s rather primly. “Minerva McGonagall. Gryffindor prefect. I’m a fifth year- I do hope your mother’s a decent potions master, because this _is_ my OWL year.”

“ _This is my OWL year_ ,” Malcolm imitates her under his breath, then ducks when she swings Mae’s floating suitcase at his head. “Watch it!”

“She’s the best,” Mae says, affronted. “My name's Mae Benson and her name’s Amy Benson and she’s the best potions teacher you’ll ever have, is what she is. She can brew a Draught of Living Death in her sleep.” So what if it’s not strictly true? Family and the truth don’t often mix. Auntie V said that once. 

Minerva doesn’t look too convinced, but she simply nods towards the line of first years, now headed down towards the lake shore. “Well, you’d better catch up with the rest of them. Malcolm, come on, show her the way-,”

“Yeah, because I’ve done this _so many_ times before, I have!” 

“I don’t need your help anyways,” Mae tells him coldly, stalking ahead now that she’s been relieved of her suitcase. He quickly catches up with her.

“Good, because I didn’t feel like giving it, Nancy Drew.”

She’s about to say something extremely clever and cutting when, for the first time, she takes in the sight of the castle looming over the lake. Mae has seen Hogwarts by night many times before, but until now, every night it has been dark. Now there must be a candle or lantern in every window, because it doesn’t so much as perch on the clifftop, it beams and glows, and the rays of light seem to stretch out onto the surface of the lake like an artificial sun, revealing the ripples of the little waves and eddies. “Unreal,” she says, looking from the lake to the castle to the lake and back again, while Malcolm McGonagall is momentarily stunned into silence beside her, his hands in his pockets. 

There’s only a few boats left. Mae takes advantage of this to dart ahead. “I’m holding the lantern!” He kicks pebbles after her, but follows suit as she clambers into the boat, using the lantern to momentarily peer into the depths. She doesn’t see anything, no merfolk, no squid, only shadows on the water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. My main purpose of switching back and forth between Mae and Amy is to not get too tired of one POV and to keep up a credible amount of tension, even if it may be frustrating at times for the readers. So Mae doesn't know what Amy's been doing all day up at the castle, and next chapter we'll see the Sorting and opening feast/start of the term through Amy's eyes. I hope this chapter did not come across as too slow-moving or just like filler. I felt like I should establish Mae's feelings about going to a 'real' school for the first time in her life, and despite her excitement and desire to be independent, her anxiety and hesitance as well.
> 
> 2\. The fight that begins this chapter isn't really intended to be a sign of anything serious, only it seemed like the sort of overblown argument that could easily happen between mother and daughter, based purely on stubbornness. Amy probably could have still taken Mae down to King's Cross to get the train, even if would have been a temporary inconvenience. Mae probably could have chosen to react in a less... melodramatic... manner. But the main point is that while Amy wants to be a good mother and she does fiercely love Mae, that doesn't mean all her decisions for Mae are 100% air-tight and perfect. Besides that, Mae is not the most easygoing kid and she really hates feeling left in the dark or kept unaware of things. We can see where this is going.
> 
> 3\. The bonus of magical photos is that they also double as brief home videos. One thing Mae is aware of is that she, in her view, had a very happy and fun childhood, which I think for Amy was something she fought tooth and nail to give to her, because Amy's own childhood was... not very happy or very 'fun' in any sense of the word. Amy has no pictures of herself as a little girl, so naturally she has hundreds of Mae. She never got to have birthday parties with presents and cake, so Mae had one every year. She never had family holiday celebrations or got to play games with a mother or father, so she tried to give that to her own daughter. Mae has very much been 'spoiled' in terms of affection and love, if not physical items or wealth.
> 
> 4\. British military dog tags during WW2 were actually more circular than rectangular, fun fact. They were also commonly put on leather bootlaces and generally contained the initials, surname, and religion, in case anyone was wondering. But I'm far from a history buff so I apologize in advance if anything in this story turns out not to be terribly accurate. As far as Mae is aware, as mentioned in the epilogue of BW, her father was a former POW who her mother briefly met during her time in France as what was essentially a medic with the magical relief services in Europe. Mae believes he died of a muggle illness before she was born, hence her going on about how he might have lived had he been a wizard. 
> 
> 5\. Hogsmeade is cute and quaint, but not particularly fun for a lonely kid during the summer. Amy's very protective (or paranoid) parenting stands out in an era where kids were generally allowed to roam free by themselves when out of school, strange adults were considered a lot more trustworthy and well-intentioned, and doors in small towns were typically left unlocked. 
> 
> 6\. Minerva's original canonical birth year was set as being 1935, but I think at this point we can all say that most of HP canon is more than fair game. In this story she is four years older than Mae, 15 years old in 1957, a very invested new prefect, and completely fed up with her brother. Malcolm isn't entirely my invention- canonically (again, however much weight that holds) Minerva did have two younger brothers, Malcolm and Robert, who also attended Hogwarts. We'll be seeing quite a bit of him and his sister. 
> 
> 7\. Most of this chapter was pre-written last week, which is why I can actually update this fic this weekend. If you read Haunt/Hunt as well, there likely won't be any updates for it this coming week due to me having to hastily rearrange travel plans to get back to the US in light of the virus updates.


	6. Amy III

HOGWARTS, SEPTEMBER 1957

There’s undeniably something surreal about sitting at the head table of the Great Hall. Amy had to resist the urge to look up and around, wide-eyed, like she once had as a little girl, when she filed into the hall with the rest of the professors. She’s not sure of the last time she was in this hall. It must have been her seventh year, but she was gone before the grand end-of-term feast, the one that would have honored all the graduating students. She doesn’t remember the last meal or the last conversation or when she sat down to eat with her friends. She hopes it was happy.

But realistically, it probably wasn’t. She was probably in a right state, a tied up little ball of tension, knowing she was so close, so close to making a break for it, and hating all the while that she had to. She should have been happy. She was a good student; she was a bloody prefect, for Circe’s sake. The war was over. She made very decent marks on her exams. She should have been thrilled, excited to be graduating and heading out into a newly peaceful world. But it wasn’t peaceful, of course, whether the wars were over or not, and she wasn’t thrilled or excited. 

Amy thinks she hates him a little for that. And she hates herself much more for how much she second-guessed herself, how close she came, several times, to giving up the ghost and resigning herself to what was coming. It wouldn’t have even been that difficult. No gnashing of teeth or wailing, no mournfully looking out windows. If she was dodging a cage, it was a golden one. She had every reason to want to leave, to get well away from this structure he and the entire bloody society had built up around them… But she also had more than a few reasons to want to stay. Practicality, for one thing. Routine. Comfort. Nostalgia. Love.

It was like getting out of a hot shower and stepping into a frigid set of rooms. Eventually the water would have turned lukewarm and awful anyways, but in the moment it was almost torturous to convince herself to pull the plug. 

So it feels very strange indeed to sit here at the long, narrow high table, gazing at the four sets of billowing house banners floating in the air alongside thousands of candles. They haven’t changed the positions of the tables, but she could swear they’re much bigger than she remembers. The hall itself seems cavernous. It must have shrunk in her mind over the years of being a student, but now it’s massive again, and the people, the ghosts, the furniture, all seem like dolls in comparison. Just dolls rattling around in a very big house. The stars in the night sky overhead are shockingly bright, brighter even than they look outside the castle itself. Amy knows; she’s sat outside with Mae and watched them, picking out the different constellations the way she did years before with a little boy. 

There’s certainly more teachers than she remembers. She supposes she never spent much time considering them as a girl. Professor Beery was her head of house, and Madame Amell ran the infirmary, and that was about all she concerned herself with. There was also Headmaster Dippet, of course, and Professor Dumbledore, but she kept her head down. She was never written up for anything, never lost house points or got a detention. Her professors considered her a ‘good girl’. She knows because they would say it. “You’re a good girl, Amy. You’re respectful. You work hard. Never a moment’s trouble from you.” 

Mrs Cole would say the same thing, with the addendum of- “But I swear, whenever I see Tom and you, I know you’re up to something. Don’t let him rope you into things.” What, she could never say, because past the age of ten or so, Tom never did anything at Wool’s to warrant getting so much as a scolding. A lack of witnesses or evidence of guilt would do that. Amy was used to the same wide-eyed insistence, something she herself had perfected almost better than him- “I don’t know. I didn’t see anything. Tom was with me. We were just playing. It wasn’t him.”

The formal black robes they’re all required to wear for the star-of-term feast are slightly too long on her, and the high collar itches at her neck. Had she known beforehand, she wouldn’t have bothered with her best blouse; she would have just come with her slip tucked into her trousers. At least there’s that. Schoolgirls might still be required to wear skirts and penny loafers, but Amy hasn’t been a schoolgirl in a very long time, and skirts and dresses aren’t very practical in a potions laboratory. The high-backed chair behind her is hard and unforgiving against her spine, and while the tables are all bare of food at the moment, that doesn’t mean she can’t smell it, wafting up from the kitchens beneath them. 

At least that’s one thing to look forward to. Amy’s not a terrible cook, and she was always a decent baker, but she’s hardly had the time to spend in the kitchen. Mae will be ecstatic to be eating anything that didn’t just take ten minutes to haphazardly heat up or stir. They didn’t exactly partake in a terribly varied diet before this. Amy rubs the heels of her shoes together discreetly under the table, like Dorothy trying to get home to Kansas. She’s not used to being in a pair of high heels all day, and she’s been up and down stairs since this morning, filing in and out of the mandatory meetings to catch everyone up on the new schedules, their class lists, the adjusted Code of Conduct and rulebook, and the classroom assignments. 

By now she’s starved, truly, and her head is still spinning. She hadn’t realized quite how much work must go into managing the school, and making sure everyone is where they need to be and has the proper materials for their lessons. When she first sat down at that round oaken table in Dippet’s spacious office, she’d felt like a last minute addition to King Arthur’s knights. The one who showed up in makeshift armor and without a sword, for that matter. Amy’s never been a very nervous or insecure person, has always prided herself on keeping a cool head and a steady hand, but she won’t deny there were a few perilous moments of, if not intimidation, at least hesitance when all those heads swiveled to look at her.

Dippet had seemed reluctant to acknowledge Slughorn’s replacement at all, and Dumbledore had offered a kindly smile she didn’t quite trust, and Beery had beamed and waved at her, instantly recognizing her, to her mild dismay, while Amell had given her an almost proud nod of acceptance. Carmody had raised her cup of tea as if in mock salute. Witherspoon had seemed shocked to see her, and whispered something to the man next to her, maybe wondering at Amy’s age. The rest had merely looked either confused, indifferent, or politely welcoming, giving small smiles or raised eyebrows before they turned their attention back to Dippet’s admittedly meandering speech about new beginnings and a joyous start to the term. “One of our biggest classes yet, entering this year,” he’d enthused. “It will truly be something remarkable to be the ones guiding their magical talents into a better world.”

If there’d been any scoffs or groans following that, well, everyone was polite enough to keep them quiet.

Now Amy sits surrounded by coworkers whom she barely knows, watching the older students pour into the warmly lit hall and take up their places at their respective tables, adjusting hats and robes as they slide down the benches to make room for others, speaking in a hushed roar of chatter. They all look so young, to her amazement, even the very oldest students. It’s difficult to imagine herself among them, sitting at the Hufflepuff table with Vera and Ruby or Matthew and Patsy, commiserating about the long train ride or their brutal class schedules. 

“It doesn’t get any easier as time goes by, you know,” a voice directly to her left says. “They just manage to look younger and younger every year, until you feel as though you’re about to crumble into dust.” 

Amy is sitting in between the grizzled and scarred Kettleburn, who taught her Care of Magical Creatures class a decade ago, but who now insists she call him Sly, not Professor Kettleburn or even Silvanus, and the in-comparison relatively baby faced Finch, who teaches Astronomy and is the Ravenclaw head of house. He wasn’t teaching when she was in school, and she didn’t get much of a look at him during their meetings, so now Amy turns politely, catching his slightly self-conscious smile of bemusement. 

“Sidney,” he says, holding out his hand politely. “Sorry. Days like this don’t leave much of a window for small talk. I’m the Astronomy professor-,”

“I know,” Amy says, shaking his hand. His handshake is firm, to her approval. She can’t stand it when men go suddenly delicate and gentle when shaking hands with a woman, or worse, refuse to at all. “Amy Benson, Potions. But I’m sure you’ve heard.”

“Office gossip,” he comments, then is quick to add- “Said gossip not being myself, of course. I’ve been back a week just straightening out Astronomy tower. Haven’t had much time to speculate. Don’t worry. I was twenty eight when I started here; you’ve already got a leg-up there.”

“Are you saying I look old for my age?” Amy smiles, mostly in relief that he’s speaking to her like a colleague, and not an overgrown child. He can’t be more than a decade older than her, if that, although she doesn’t remember his face from her school days. 

“Damn it,” he runs a hand through his hair, which is longer than would be fashionable for a muggle man, but not at all out of the ordinary for a wizard. His last name suits him; he has a feathery, slightly harried look about him, from his tousled light brown hair to his heavily freckled hands and face, his sharp nose and thin eyebrows, and his slight, almost slender build, like a racehorse jockey. “Is it too early in the year to claim the absent-minded academic excuse? You look perfectly well. You know, to teach. And all that.”

“I’ll forgive you if you promise to keep me from committing any serious offenses in the teacher’s lounge for the next few months,” Amy says under her breath, watching the stool and the Hat be brought out in preparation for the imminent Sorting. The first years must be outside in the antechamber with Dumbledore. Mae is probably complaining about the wait. “I’m not quite used to the setting. I was practicing at a community clinic before this-,”

“In Spain, I heard?” He smiles briefly, revealing neat, straight teeth she is almost envious of. “Carmody mentioned she thought you’d done some work with the Relief Service before that. Where did they send you?”

Amy thinks she’s taken more personal questions today than in the past decade. It’s both reassuring and a little disconcerting, although she can hardly fault them for being curious. She hasn’t followed a very traditional path to teaching here, after all. “Northern France, mostly. It was… they should have sent more over. People needed to see what had happened.”

“I agree,” he says mildly. “I was with the 6th Airborne Division.” Seeing the look on her face, he smiles almost sympathetically and adds, lowering his voice, “Halfblood, myself. Drafted as soon as my records showed I was out of school. Didn’t matter much- my brother and I would have joined up anyways. Seemed appropriate. I was always a shite duelist, but I could handle a glider and a rifle just fine.”

Before she’s forced to say something trite like ‘thank you for your service’ or ‘that was very noble of you’, or worse, compare war notes, the doors at the end of the hall open with an ominous groan, and the conversation amongst the teachers and the students abruptly dies out. Amy stiffens with expectation herself, trying to track Mae’s form among the seemingly never-ending line of first years. What if something happened? What if she never went down to the station at all, or she lost track of time, or got distracted, or worse, tried to pull another hare-brained stunt and Floo somewhere-

When she picks out Mae, standing near the back of the line beside a tall, skinny boy with a crew-cut, she lets out an audible breath of relief. Mae doesn’t look thrilled, shifting from foot to foot and folding her arms across her chest, but she’s distracted within moments by the sky full of starlight and candlelight overhead. Amy’s sigh hasn’t gone unnoticed- “Which one is your little girl?” the witch on the other side of Sidney eagerly demands, leaning across him to speak to Amy with great familiarity. Her platinum blonde hair is in a fantastically curly poodle cut framing her pointed, narrow face, and her eyes are a startling shade of blue-green, framed by pale lashes. “I think it’s just darling- most of us teachers are either childless or practically grandparents!” 

“Amy, this is Iris Penvenen,” Sidney says with dry fondness. “Professor of Divination, and the definitive office gossip.”

“Yes, hello!” Iris drops her voice to a hushed whisper as Dumbledore walks up to the Hat, unfurling the almost comically long scroll for the Sorting. “Sid and I are old chums from school- I think I was a seventh year when you were just starting out, and he’d already graduated, of course! It’s not every day a Ravenclaw and a Hufflepuff become such fast friends, you know.” She winks. “So which one is it? Does she look like you?”

“Not from a distance,” Amy mutters. “Ah… she’s the dark-haired girl towards the back, next to the tall boy. Polka dot headband, bobbed hair, sour look on her face-,”

“Ooh, I see her,” Iris murmurs. “She doesn’t look very pleased, does she?”

“Most aren’t at their Sorting,” Sidney says fairly. “It’s a big fuss for no reason, you know?”

“Speak for yourself,” Iris says, scandalized. “I was delighted to carry on a proud family tradition-,”

She is cut off by a sharp ‘shh’ from Madam Rutherford, the librarian, and an exasperated glare from June Carmody, who rolls her eyes and mutters something to the Arithmancy professor, Morgenstern, just as the Sorting Hat breaks into song. What Amy will say is that the Hat is not anymore in tune in 1957 than it was in 1938. On the other hand, she could have sworn the song is shorter than it was most of her school years. Perhaps it’s just running out of new material, now that there’s no war or other dark threat on the horizon to sinisterly foreshadow in every verse. 

Finally, the Hat grows stiff and silent once more, Dumbledore clears his throat with a polite cough, and squints down at the list through his crescent-moon shaped spectacles. “ABBOTT, DAVID!” A towheaded boy Amy is mostly certain is Matthew Abbott’s nephew comes jogging up to the stool, all smiles. He doesn’t have to wait long under the Hat. 

“GRYFFINDOR!” Rumor has it the first house to receive a new student is guaranteed good luck all year long. The Gryffindors are possibly even more rowdy and obnoxious than they were when Amy was in school; their table bursts into raucous cheers, catcalls, and applause, and a few bold ones light up their wands with sparks as David Abbott takes his place among them.

“ACKLES, JANE!” is next, and in an even shorter amount of time goes directly to “HUFFLEPUFF!”

She’s followed by a redhead by the name of “ADLER, MARGARET!” who is very nearly a hatstall, swinging her legs without a care in the world, perched upon the stool, until the Hat decides at last, “SLYTHERIN!” There’s a few groans from the Ravenclaw table, now that they’re officially the last to receive a new student, but never fear-

“APPLEWHITE, CHRISTINE!” goes promptly to “RAVENCLAW!”

All Amy can think, in between her ears constantly ringing from all the cheers and applause, is that this sorting is already much longer than her own was before they’ve even finished with the surnames beginning with ‘A’. Just looking at the line of first years, she thinks there must be well over a hundred of them, possibly nearly two hundred. It’s absolute madness. If they have very many hatstalls, they could be here for a good three hours just trying to get through everyone.

Fortunately, most of the sortings are near instantaneous. Amy wonders idly if the Hat experiences time differently, if it can slow down the racing thoughts in a panicky young mind in order to parse through them properly. That’s something Mae would be dying to know, although Amy dreads the day she finds out about mind magic. She doesn’t know what she believes in regards to ‘power corrupts’, but she absolutely believes there’s plenty of magic out there that while not ‘dark’, shouldn’t be messed with nearly as much as it is. The same goes for those bloody obliviators, treating muggle’s brains like wind-up toys just because they’re too lazy to come up with a halfway decent cover story. 

The As are finally finished off with “ARBUCKLE, PAUL!” to “HUFFLEPUFF!” and “ARMITAGE, MARY!” to “GRYFFINDOR!” and then they’re onto the Bs. Amy’s glad she doesn’t have long to wait to see Mae through this last hurdle. Of course it won’t be the end of the world if she gets Slytherin. Amy never judged Tom for his house, not nearly as much as he complained about hers, how frustratingly mundane and common it was, how he was so sure the Hat had missorted her, but that doesn’t mean she wants Mae around certain… influences that he was privy to as a Slytherin. 

It’s not that there aren’t malevolent little shits with superiority complexes in every house. Of course there are. It’s just that the Slytherins tend to obsessively protect their own, and the last thing Amy needs is Mae getting absorbed into some deluded little pseudo-family and feeling as though she owes them for their ‘loyalty’ to her. Amy knows how teenagers work. She was one, not so long ago. They get bored, they do stupid things, they make up all kinds of rules and games for themselves. And very often they lie for one another, and they don’t really stop after one, they just let them pile up around them like heaps of rubbish until they have no idea what they stand for or who they’re even standing with. 

She tenses as “BARDELL, SUSAN!” goes to “HUFFLEPUFF!” and “BARROW, ROBERT!” to “GRYFFINDOR!” Nearly there. Then it’s “BEATTY, ANN!” to “RAVENCLAW!” and “BELGRAVE, JANET!” to “SLYTHERIN!”. Janet Belgrave is clearly nervous, and nearly drops the Hat as she scrambles down from the rickety old stool. Fortunately, Dumbledore catches it before it can hit the dusty floor and sends her fleeing to the Slytherin table, already flushed bright red at the intermingled cheers and jeers of her onlooking housemates. Amy watches, hands clasped tightly in her lap, as Dumbledore returns to the scroll and calls out-

“BENSON, MAE!”

There’s a beat of silence and then Mae comes loping up from the very back of the line like a stray dog, making a strict beeline for the stool and the Hat. Amy can’t really make out the look she throws Dumbledore’s way, but he smiles benevolently as he has at all the students before her, no sudden signs of recognition, no look of warning directed at Amy, no ‘what have you done’ or ‘I knew this was coming’, and then the Hat has settled onto Mae’s small head…

And they wait. And wait. A minute passes. Amy forgets to breathe a few times, as much she’s trying to convince herself that this is a non-event, a typically hysterical maternal overreaction on her part, the house is nothing, it doesn’t matter, she’ll be just fine wherever she goes- Gryffindor, she thinks confidently, as they near the second minute, she’s certainly got the guts for it-

“RAVENCLAW!” the hat squawks, and Amy blinks, eyes suddenly dry, as Mae alights from the stool, gazes out over the sea of students for a moment, a hand on her hip like a captain surveying her marauding pirate crew, and then walks briskly over to the cheering Ravenclaw table with her usual uncanny devil-may-care attitude. Amy feels a renewed surge of hunger in her relief for her, which is quickly drowned out by the realization that they are still only at B, and have an entire list of students to get through.

“I apologize in advance,” she is quick to tell Sidney Finch, “if she gives you any trouble- well, she will- just send her my way, I’ll set her straight-,”

He appears unsurprised. “Don’t worry. I’ve plenty of experience crushing young egos,” he mimes a closing fist around one of the dinner forks. “You’d be surprised how common they are in Ravenclaw. Well, maybe not. We do have a bit of a reputation for being-,”

“Conceited, condescending intellectuals with no concept of social etiquette?” Iris chirps, without looking away from the Sorting.

Sidney winces. “That’s one manner of phrasing it, I suppose.”

“Oh, I think it’s the only manner,” she grins, then cries out in delight as “BONES, WILLIAM!” is sorted into “HUFFLEPUFF!”. “Yes! That’s half a dozen already! Excellent!”

“She’s thinking about creating a private army of badgers,” June announces loudly to a smirking Kettleburn.

The rest of the Sorting ekes out in between cheers and shouts and the occasional rapidfire wager between professors. 

“Ravenclaw, I’m telling you,” Sidney insists as a bashful “CALLENDER, EDWIN” creeps up to the stool, beet red from all the attention. 

“Not a chance,” Kettleburn growls. “His sisters are in my class. Gryffindor to the bone, that whole family-,”

“SLYTHERIN!” the Hat pronounces thirty seconds later, and June slaps her hand down onto the table in triumph. “Lovely.”

By the time they reach “CLOUD, WINIFRED!” Amy feels confident enough to predict Hufflepuff, and is very gratified by the results.

The Hat picks up the pace by the time they’ve gotten to the Es, plowing right through “ECCLESTON, ELIZABETH!” and “ELSEGOOD, COLIN!” both to Slytherin, followed by a whole slew of Fs and Gs, including, but not limited to “FARRELL, JENNIFER!” and “FIRTH, BARRY!” as well as “GARLAND, IAN!” and “GATTI, JACQUELINE!”. There’s mercifully far fewer Hs and Is, before the dreaded Js, Ks, and Ls, kick in, leading to the Ms, which nearly all the professors grimace at, knowing it’s going to take forever to get through all of them.

“Here we go,” Iris comments slyly as “MCGONAGALL, MALCOLM!” follows “MCCALL, JANICE!” up to the Hat.

“Who, McCall?” Sidney mutters in confusion. “I don’t remember the name-,”

“No, McGonagall!” Iris hisses. “You know all about the sister! Prefect, dropped my class with a scathing note in the middle of term two years ago.”

“Oh, that one,” he snorts. “Very indignant, wasn’t she?”

“I believe the sentence, ‘ _I expected to be under the instruction of a legitimate seer, given the exorbitant cost of the textbook and crystal ball._ ’ was used,” Iris mimics a Scottish brogue with alarming accuracy, before cutting herself off as this younger McGonagall goes straight to “RAVENCLAW!”. “Ah well, good luck, Sid.”

Amy is feeling quite faint with hunger by the time they reach the tail end of the alphabet, and some of the students look suspiciously as though they were dozing under their pointed hats. “Thank Christ,” Kettleburn mutters as “ZISKIND, JUDITH” rounds out the entire affair, whereupon she is immediately sent to “GRYFFINDOR!”.

She straightens in her seat as Dippet totters forward to make his welcoming speech, watching most of the students and professors remove their hats either as a sign of respect or in preparation to eat, and keeps her eyes on Mae, now wedged between other first years at the Ravenclaw table, head bent as she whispers back and forth with them. At least she doesn’t seem upset, or nervous. Anything but, in fact. Amy’s never worried about her making friends; Mae isn’t always the easiest to get on with, but she’s spirited and bright and charming in her own way. She’ll do very well in Ravenclaw, so long as she learns when to keep her mouth shut. 

There’s a muffled chorus of relief when the food finally appears on the tables before them, as Dipper returns to his seat, smiling broadly. Amy is almost taken aback by just how much there is; holiday dinner parties aside, she hasn’t seen a spread like this in, well, years, and it’s all she can do to politely begin to spoon things onto her plate without looking like a feral animal. Fortunately, there’s a significant lull in conversation for the next ten minutes or so as everyone tucks in, and she relaxes slightly, not having to worry about making professional-sounding small talk or fielding questions about her daughter. 

“Have you seen what your schedule looks like this week?” Iris finally asks her as Amy finishes off the last of her potatoes and haggis, looking up from her plate. 

“A bit,” she says, swallowing. “I’ve got about five classes just of first years, there’s so many of them. Most in the mornings or early afternoon.”

“They try to put the younger students first on the class schedule,” Sidney offers, in between sips of pumpkin juice. “It’s so you have them when you’re fresh with patience. But the sixth and seventh year classes should be much smaller, especially for you- loads of them don’t qualify for NEWTs-level Potions.”

“I’m almost more worried about the NEWTs-level,” Amy admits, although she wonders if showing insecurity this early into the term is a bad idea, even around her colleagues. “I’ve got the lesson plans finalized, of course, but I really haven’t brewed some of the more theoretical potions in years- Amortentia, for example.”

Iris raises a pale eyebrow. “That one’s got a nasty kick, doesn’t it? I can’t believe they still put that in the curriculum. You know one of the little buggers tries to slip their sweetheart a dose every few years.”

“It’s punishable with prison time, if one of the new bills goes through,” Sidney comments. 

“It’s incredibly difficult to brew correctly,” Amy shrugs. “I suppose MESP knows most of them will mess it up their first dozen attempts, anyways. We only teach it to hammer down on keeping your measurements and weighings exact during the brewing process. Same with Living Death. Horribly dangerous, but it’s the same with Defence, isn’t it? There’s a reason why they still teach about the Unforgivables.”

“I never worry when I’m teaching those,” June cuts in coolly from a few places down, as Mistral, the Alchemy professor, passes her a soup ladle. “It’s the more minor spells you’ve got to watch out for. Stunners, for example. They treat it like a cute little party trick, and next thing you know someone’s accidentally killed their bloody dog trying to impress their friends making Fido play dead.”

Amy feels a brief prickle of unease at the back of her neck. “But they’re taught the consequences of misuse, of course. Those sort of things are supposed to be for life-or-death situations.”

“What consequences?” June snorts. When she smiles, it tugs at the vicious scar on her left cheek, the fishhook flexing up and down. “The only ones who see any consequences for it are the ones unlucky enough to live in muggle households where the Trace is much stronger. There’s no law against children practicing spells within a magical household.”

“There should be,” Iris huffs. “They’ve got no reason to be using their wands during the holidays. It’s pure laziness and boredom. When I was in school my aunt used to take our wands and lock them up in her desk when we came home, just to remove the temptation.”

“She sounds lovely,” Sidney interjects dryly.

“Well,” June smiles thinly, “we all know my opinions on them being surrounded by muggles in the first place.”

“Surely you’re not advocating for the complete removal of muggleborn wizards from their parents,” Victor Morgenstern, the bald Arithmancy professor, protests. “Even the opposition party hasn’t broached that yet. Demanding we tighten up security with memory charms and more intermediary agents is one thing, but to effectively orphan a child-,”

“Some would argue they were orphans from the moment they got the letter,” June says tightly, before she seems to shake off the tension, passing her goblet over to Rutherford. “Top me up, Viv, won’t you? I’ve a feeling this is going to be a long one.”

The feast is a long one. Amy’s more full than she’s felt in months an hour into it, but it shows no sign of slowing down, beyond the appearance of the desserts on the table. Mae must be in heaven. Amy doesn’t want to look down to see if she’s intent on ruining her teeth with heaps of sugar and bowls of ice cream. On the other hand, there is a note of relief to the whole thing. They made it. They’re here. Both her and Mae in one piece, relocated to perhaps the safest place in magical Britain. The worst thing she has to worry about here is a few rowdy students or losing her nerve while up at the blackboard. Mae will get to be happy, and normal, and do ordinary things, like go to class and bemoan homework and argue with her new friends. 

“Who’re the Ravenclaw prefects?” she asks Sidney at one point, as he polishes off the last of his apple crumble. Iris is sighing and yawning in her chair, stifling it with a small hand. Kettleburn nodded off a few minutes ago, and is softly snoring into his napkin.

“The fifth years will take them up to the common room,” Sidney says, in between yawns, “though I don’t envy them that walk right now. Ah, Eileen Prince and Hugh Weaver are the new ones this year.”

“Merlin knows why you picked the Prince girl, Sidney,” Nigel Romilly, who teaches Ancient Runes and who Amy disliked almost immediately from the moment his bristly eyebrows knitted together in disapproval upon seeing her enter the room. "She's scared of her own shadow."

“Well, Nigel, I suppose as the Head of House, I had particular insights that you just weren’t privy to,” Sidney says calmly, although he spares an irritated glance with Amy and Iris. “Eileen could use our encouragement. She’s very capable; she just needs someone to take her seriously. And Hugh is…” He trails off as they all watch the blonde boy who must be Weaver topple backwards out of his seat after leaning back too far, “Well, he’ll rise to the challenge.”

“Or fall. Flat on his arse,” Lucinda Amell comments with a ‘what can you do’ smile. She reaches over and squeezes Amy’s shoulder in an unusual display of affection. “We’re not required to stay here all night, you know. The prefects will be taking the first years up any minute now. If you want to slip out, Dippet won’t mind.”

“Or notice,” Iris chuckles.

“I couldn’t,” Amy says politely, even if her eyes are exhausted and her feet have reached an unheard level of agony. “It’d be rude- I can hold on a little while longer.”

“Where are your rooms?” Iris presses. “Not all the way down in the dungeons, I hope. God, that place used to scare the life out of me- no offense, Junie.”

June waves a hand while taking another swig of her elderberry wine, as if to say ‘none taken’.

“No,” Amy says, rubbing at her eyes. “The first floor, actually. I thought it’d be more convenient- closer to the Great Hall and the infirmary-,”

“Then you’re in an excellent position to come to our nightcaps on the weekends,” Iris brightens. “It’s Lucinda, Calliope, and I- you know Calliope, of course-,”

“Amy was one of my best students,” Calliope Witherspoon interjects, having heard her name from further down the table. 

Amy flushes slightly, mostly due to how strange it feels to be even having this discussion with a woman who used to one of her favorite professors. “You were an excellent teacher.”

“Well, I hardly started out that way,” Witherspoon stretches, the familiar belled necklace jangling and chiming with her every move. “It’s a steep learning curve the first few months, but once you get used to the classroom and the children, I’m sure you’ll feel right at home. Hogwarts tends to have that affect.”

Amy feels sudden eyes on her, and catches Dumbledore glancing down the length of the table at her, blue eyes disarmingly keen and bright despite his age. She’d been half-expecting him to take her aside at any point during today, and reveal some hidden agenda, but thus far, nothing. Is he waiting her out, waiting for her to ask why he clearly pushed for her hiring, wrote the offer himself? Or is she just reading too much into the whole thing? She had about two conversations with the man outside of class during her seven years at Hogwarts. He may be an extraordinarily powerful wizard, but he is, after all, still just a professor of Transfiguration. It’s not as though he knows everything. 

She hopes.

“I feel sometimes as though I never left in the first place,” she says, and there’s a few smiles and knowing chuckles, just as the prefects begin to order the first years into new lines. She watches as Mae tiredly steps into line alongside her fellow Ravenclaws, not even sparing a glance for the head table. Amy ignores the sudden pang of trepidation in her chest. She’s growing up. This is normal. Of course she’s not going to attach herself to Amy’s side anymore. She’s becoming a young woman. But that doesn’t mean the prospect is any less frightening.

When it was just her and Mae, it was easier to excuse things. To pretend. To tell herself that the only thing that mattered was keeping Mae safe and happy. Now? It’s like they’ve finally come out of a very narrow corridor into a wide open meadow. Or a quidditch pitch. There’s all sorts of things at play now. Her colleagues. Her students. Hogwarts. The Ministry. MESP. Tom. At the last thought, her throat tightens slightly. She takes one last sip of her drink as the table begins to magically clear itself of dirty dishes and scattered utensils. No. Tonight is a good night. Tonight is a victory. And she is not going to spend it fretting and worrying about this or that.

“Finally,” Sidney sighs as the professors begin to stand up, collecting hats and robes and handbags. “This gets more and more drawn-out every year, I’m sure of it.”

“Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport,” Iris swats him affectionately on the arm. “I think it’s wonderful. One big celebration to begin the school year. The real work begins tomorrow, you know!””

“Right,” he yawns again and rolls back his shoulders, allowing Amy and Iris to step down from the platform first. “Only, I haven’t got class until nine o’clock in the evening at the earliest, so while you're all scurrying about cleaning up your desks, I’ll still be sleeping in.”

“Oh, save it, Finch,” June sweeps past them, heels clicking across the stone floor as they make their way towards the nearest doorway. “You’ve got no business gloating like that, you’re a Ravenclaw. You’re supposed to enjoy this.”

“Well, I’m not a Slytherin, so I haven’t got quite the taste for masochism you lot do,” he retorts, and Amy laughs, loudly and unexpectedly, as they duck out into the dimly lit hall, leaving the loud din of the Great Hall behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wasn't sure if I'd be able to get this up this weekend or not, but we made it. 
> 
> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I thought this chapter would be a good opportunity to show the Sorting through the perspective of a teacher, instead of a student, something we never see in canon, and don't really encounter in most fics. While it sort of sucks that we didn't get to see Mae's direct POV on this, we will be hearing plenty from her next chapter about her introduction to Hogwarts. I also thought it would be interesting to compare Amy's own Sorting Ceremony years ago to this; obviously Hogwarts is experiencing the effects of the post-war Baby Boom just as much as the rest of the world. In terms of population, it's been a badly needed asset to the magical community via providing them with a very large generation of new witches and wizards. On the other hand, Hogwarts isn't quite sure what to expect or how to handle such a massive influx of new students, hence an excruciatingly long Sorting process.
> 
> 2\. Obviously several of the professors from Amy's time in school have been replaced. We meet a lot of new faces in this chapter, as Amy will be spending a lot of time around the other staff at Hogwarts. But we also see some old ones as well. In case people don't really remember, Calliope Witherspoon was the Charms professor when Amy was in school, and she still holds this position. Likewise, Lucinda Amell, Amy's old mentor, is still the school nurse, and Herbert Beery is still the Hufflepuff Head of House and Herbology professor. And of course there's Silvanus Kettleburn, the worse-for-the-wear Care of Magical Creatures professor. We also see some new faces, chief among them being Sidney Finch, the new Ravenclaw Head of House and Astronomy professor, and Iris Penvenen, the very bubbly Divination professor and a former Hufflepuff. We'll be learning more about them and other people as the story progresses.
> 
> 3\. To be honest, one of my favorite things to do with any HP fic is to come up with names for the Sorting. We'll be seeing quite a bit of some of these students in the future. I know a lot of people were predicting Gryffindor for Mae, and Amy was inclined to suspect that as well, but I really wanted to explore a more underrepresented house in this fic, and I have a lot of plans for both Ravenclaw and Mae in the future, especially as she's not the 'stereotypical' very serious and academics-focused Ravenclaw student. We also see that Eileen Prince is one of her perfects. I know canon heavily implies that Severus' mother was a Slytherin like himself, but we're also playing with canon like a ball of yarn in this fic, so Ravenclaw it is. 
> 
> 4\. Amy hasn't really been around a big group of adults, some closer to her age, some much older, in a while, given that before this she was working at a tiny clinic with just two other people. So this is all a bit overwhelming for her as well, especially with how much responsibility she now has to teach multiple classes throughout the week and keep a bunch of teenagers in-line. So if she seemed uncharacteristically shy or quiet in this chapter, that's probably why. Don't worry, it's never taken her long to come out of her shell before, as we all know.
> 
> 5\. Basically due to two of the main characters of this fic being Amy and Mae, we are for obvious reasons going to be spending a lot of time at Hogwarts. However, I want to reassure everyone that this fic will still go to different locations beyond the school. This is not going to really be a strict day-by-day account of Mae's time as a student or Amy's time as a teacher. While obviously we will see our fair share of classroom interactions and meals in the Great Hall and quidditch matches and so on, this fic will cover other POVs, some of whom have nothing to do with Hogwarts at all. So we will still see what is happening at the Ministry and beyond, in case anyone was worried about this story being too focused just on slice of life school days. Amy isn't bound to the school, and as much as she treats it like a safety net, we'll see her in other settings besides the castle or Hogsmeade. We'll also of course be hearing from our favorite engaged couple in the near future.


	7. Mae III

HOGWARTS, SEPTEMBER 1957

Mae is nearly sure she’s about to vomit by the time they reach the fifth floor of the castle. Not only did she eat more over the course of the past three hours than she’s eaten in her entire life, she finished it off by consuming a frankly obscene amount of chocolate chip mint ice cream. She doesn’t regret that, but she does regret fighting to be in the front of the long line of Ravenclaw first years climbing the staircase to the common room. Because of her position near the front, she’s had to walk quickly or be bumped into, and because of that, not only is she winded and disoriented by the time the staircase- which moves!- deposits them on the correct floor.

Lurching stomach and sweaty face aside- this uniform was obviously not made for physical activities beyond sitting down and standing up- she leans against the marble banister, which comes up to her chest, wishing it was even higher so she could rest her hot forehead against it. The prefects are hushing people, telling them to keep their voices down and make room for the first years still streaming up off the stairs, but Mae can barely hear them beyond the blood rushing in her years. Oh. They are very high up. She can see straight down to the first floor from here, and it’s like looking through a jigsaw puzzle, watching the stairs slide in and out of place, through the air in an endless geometrical pattern. 

Now she feels even more queasy. A sharp finger prods her on the shoulder, and she angrily bats at it. “Get off!”

“If you’re going to be sick,” Malcolm McGonagall is suggesting, “aim for Peeves.” He jabs his thumb down, where she can barely make out a faint shape zipping through the air. “Reckon you could hit him if you aimed right.”

“He’s a poltergeist,” a girl with a shrill voice says from behind them, eavesdropping. “He’s intangible. The sick would just fall through him.”

“No one’s asked you, egghead,” Malcolm snaps at her.

“I was just saying,” the girl huffs. “You don’t have to be rude.”

Mae gives her tongue an experimental swish around her mouth, seeing if she can coax anything up. But she doesn’t feel like she’s about to heave, so after another perilous moment she turns back around, sagging against the bannister. Malcolm is looking at her with obvious disappointment. Mae sat next to him through the feast and learned a few things: First, he’s very glad he wasn’t sorted into Gryffindor like his sister, because he specifically asked the Hat not to do that, and he did want Slytherin, but he figures it’s still better than Hufflepuff, because his sister says they can be a bit dim. 

“My mum’s a Hufflepuff, and your sister’s a prick,” Mae had informed tartly him at that, and then refused to pass him the salt shaker for his baked potato. He’d gamely called for one from further down the table, then caught it out of the air when a fourth year levitated it over to him, grinning. 

Second, he didn’t even want to come here in the first place, and had really been hoping he was a muggle like his dad, because then he could go to university someday and become a doctor. Mae had asked what kind of doctor, and he said he didn’t know. A doctor of something important and scientific. “You can still become a healer,” she’d informed him. “Or an alchemist. Or a herbologist-,” He’d pulled a very ugly face at that and changed the topic again. 

Third, he had one sister, Minnie, who insisted he call her Minerva now that they were at school together, and she is completely insufferable, according to him. Not only is she a prefect, she’s Gryffindor’s star chaser and quidditch team vice captain, top of her class, and some kind of Transfiguration prodigy. “She does everything early,” he’d told Mae in disgust. “Dad says she even walked and talked early. It’s horrible. She wakes up at the crack of dawn and does all her chores and then sits down to read the newspaper. And she won’t even let me see the funnies section until she’s through it. She’s like an old man. She likes oatmeal with nothing on it. Just plain oatmeal. And she drinks black coffee in the summer. Does that sound normal to you?”

“No,” Mae had admitted. “I don’t even like oatmeal with toppings. It’s disgusting.”

He’d looked a little affronted at that, but then added that also had a brother, Robbie, who was much more tolerable than his sister, even if he was only eight and a bit of a crybaby. “There’s no way he’s getting Gryffindor,” Malcolm had said. “Thank God. Minnie would never shut up about it then. At least she’ll be graduated by the time he starts.”

Mae had wondered briefly what it might be like to have siblings. Sometimes she thought about it, but it was hard to imagine another Benson living their life alongside her and Mum. Sure, maybe it’d be nice to have a built-in friend, but not everyone liked their siblings, after all. Mum had always said Mae didn’t need a sister or brother to be happy, because they had each other, and that was all they needed. She said the same thing when Mae used to ask her if she’d ever get married. Not that Mae wanted her to. The idea of giving Mum away to some stranger disturbed her. Mae would have to poison him at their wedding, or at least threaten him in private so he knew where he ranked in the family hierarchy. 

“Do you think there’s a spell to turn spirits tangible?” Malcolm asks her now, dark eyebrows knitted together. She can already tell he’s a thousand miles away, off in his brain somewhere. She supposes it’s better than hanging around someone who’s an actual idiot. He seems smart enough, just… a little odd. And tetchy. Really tetchy. She ran out of count of how many times he lost his temper over the course of one meal. A lot. No wonder they didn’t put him in Slytherin. Aren’t Slytherins supposed to be very cool and composed? He’d lose it within minutes. 

“Check the library,” she suggests. “My mum says the library here is the largest magical one in Britain. They’ve got books from Merlin’s time. We could go to the library tomorrow morning-,”

“We have class tomorrow,” he interrupts her. He does that a lot, too. He interrupts practically everyone, all the time, and he doesn’t even act sorry about it. Mae is used to being scolded for interrupting, too, but that’s mostly with Mum. She’s never really had the chance to talk over kids her own age. “Christ, don’t you remember anything?”

Mae wrinkles her nose at him and delivers a very sharp, deliberate kick to his shin. He stumbles back on one foot, swearing.

One of the prefects has clambered atop a statue pedestal of some old dead wizard in order to address them. The statue is giving him a very dirty look, but he ignores it, slinging an arm around its stone shoulders. “HEY!” he shouts, waving his free hand, “over here! Yeah, look at me! Yes, you too! SHUT UP AND LISTEN!” His fellow prefect, this tall skinny girl with oily black hair that goes down to her waist, has her head almost in her hands like she’s too embarrassed to even watch him. 

“Hello,” he says in a much milder, more polite voice when they’ve all quieted down and turned forty tired faces to him. “I’m Hughie Weaver. Which you would know, if any of you had shut up on the way here. I’m your prefect. Does everyone know what a prefect is?”

“A brownnoser,” someone from the crowd offers. There’s a few awkward giggles. 

“Teacher’s pet!” someone else suggests, snickering.

“Scab!” Mae calls out brightly.

Hughie clearly regrets asking this question to a bunch of overtired, giggly children who’ve just consumed enough sugar to power a horde of pixies for the next decade. “Alright, cool it,” he scowls, waving his hand to quiet them down again. “I hope you little nosebleeds all paid attention on the way up here, because I’m not going to be your personal map for the next week. Fifth floor, remember that! This is the common room entrance.” He jerks an elbow towards the very tall, narrow midnight blue door before them, inlaid with overlapping patterns of bronze runes, constantly shifting and adjusting with a faint whispery sound. 

There isn’t any doorknob or handle to pull, nor any kind of window through, just a large bronze knocker in the shape of an eagle mid-flight. 

“Why isn’t it a raven?” someone asks, although they do raise their hand first.

“Because it’s not- Ravenclaw comes from the surname, not the animal- you know what, these are ‘in the future’ questions,” he grumbles. Mae feels a little bad for him. There are forty of them, after all, and it can’t have been easy to guide them all the way up here without anyone falling off the stairs to their untimely demise, or getting lost or picked off by a marauding ghost. Hughie hops down clumsily from the disgruntled statue, which mincingly adjusts its stone robes. He knocks into the girl prefect, Eileen, who stumbles back with a muffled noise. “Sorry. Eileen, d’you want to show them, or-,”

Eileen tucks some of her hair behind her pale ears, and looks almost as if frightened, between the exasperated Hughie and the impatient crowd of first years. “Alright,” she says, although Mae has to strain to even hear her. She approaches the door, glancing back over a hunched shoulder at them, and knocks. There’s a chorus of surprised and delighted murmurs when it shifts into movement and speaks in a low, gravelly voice:

“ _I cannot speak, but I will always reply. What am I?_ ”

“An echo,” Eileen replies softly, barely a moment after the eagle has finished speaking.

Hughie sighs. “You were supposed to- Eileen, we’re supposed to let them try it out-,”

Eileen goes beet red, which is saying something, given how pale and sallow her skin is. “Sorry,” she mutters, stepping guiltily away from the door as it silently swings open.

“We could always wait for a new riddle,” Malcolm offers, but Hughie ignores that, waving them through.

“Alright, get a move on. We’ve been standing out here long enough, come on-,”

One by one, the first years shuffle into the darkened common room, although the hearths burst into flame and the lanterns that seem to be hanging from the rafters all light up instantaneously, casting the dark tower room into a strange sort of shifting half-light. Still, it’s enough to make out the layout of the room. Mae’s first thought is that it smells like a very old library archive, or the backroom of an antique book shop. It smells like old paper and wax and a faint layer of dust, but also cold stone and cool fabrics, like silk and satin. 

The carpeting is plush and thick under her sore feet, and all the arched, curtained windows, which stretch nearly from ceiling to floor, give off the effect of them being in a glass container, with an almost unbroken view of the dark mountains, the gleaming lake, the massive forest, and the greenhouses and quidditch pitch far below. Mae feels a little sick again, especially when her ears pick up the sound of the wind whistling around the tower, slipping in through the cracks and eaves to send the gossamer curtains billowing. 

The ceiling itself is domed and twinkling with gold, painted stars. Unlike the artificial night sky in the Great Hall, this is merely a magical mural, and it displays all the planets and constellations as well. There are bookcases everywhere; the Ravenclaw common room gives off the sense of a miniature library wing unto itself; there’s even books stacked atop white marble fireplaces, crackling red, then blue, then green, then purple. A giant bronze globe in the center of the room spins ever so pendulous, and the circular table around it is covered with books, parchment, and abandoned inkwells. All the chairs look very artistic and elegant but comfortable, and the sofas by the windows are strewn with blankets and pillows of all shapes and sizes. Everything is either a shade of blue or bronze. 

You’d have to be willfully obtuse to not think it’s beautiful, even if Mae wishes the color scheme was a little less… plain. The first years spread out, a few of the bolder ones slumping into chairs. Mae leans against one, ignoring the glare its occupant delivers her way. Her stomach’s settled a bit, she’s still exhausted. Mum should have warned her it was going to be such a hike up here. Then again, lucky Mum just had to go down into the toasty basement when she was in school. The Hufflepuffs get off easy, don’t they? Even the Slytherins probably had a shorter walk.

Hughie and Eileen stand in the center of the circular room, in front of the globe, which almost dwarfs both of them. Eileen is nearly a head taller than Hughie, but she studies the floor while he continues with his weary lecture. “This is the common room. Obviously. You’ll come here in between classes, after dinner every night- you get the general idea. Every Ravenclaw in the school resides in the dorms above us. Girls’ rooms are to the left, boys’ are to the right. Yes, there are lavatories, you don’t need to go leave the tower to take a piss.”

“Hughie,” Eileen hisses under her breath; he shrugs.

“Your lights should be out by eleven o’clock. Don’t make us do bed-checks; no one wants that, this isn’t the bloody military. School curfew is nine o’clock, which means you’re all to be back here every night by then. Shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re off doing something stupid. If you get caught out, it’ll be an automatic detention. Or worse, house points.”

“What are house points?” someone asks immediately.

“It’s how they figure out who wins the House Cup every year. Do well in class or show off in front of the right professor, you’ll earn some. Get in trouble, you’ll lose some. Lose enough, and everyone here will probably want to kill you. We’re Ravenclaws. We’re competitive. Your first class is eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Mae groans loudly. Hughie shrugs. “I don’t make your schedules. Which, by the way, should be….” He pauses, struggling to remember.

“On your beds,” Eileen speaks up.

“Right. Don’t lose them. Finch hates to have to hand out extras. He’s your Head of House, by the way. You’ll have him for Astronomy twice a week. If you have any problems, you go straight to him.”

“Or us,” Eileen mutters.

Hughie winces. “Or us. Maybe. If it’s not too… You know. We don’t want to know your personal business. So please, Merlin, please, do not come crying to us if you’re home sick, or regular sick, or if you lost a library book. Don’t do that, by the way. I’m speaking from experience here. Rutherford will bite your head off.” 

“Anyways,” he continues, “you should be up by seven if you want any breakfast. Your other house prefects are Josie Arden, Greg Cable, Marcia Deacon, and Lee Edelstein. Lee’s Head Boy, by the way, so really, truly, do not get on his bad side.”

At the appalled look Eileen gives him, he shrugs. “Joking, joking.”

Hughie crosses the room towards the arched doorway that must lead up to the boys’ dormitory. “Alright, lads, follow me, girls-,” he gestures at Eileen. “Follow her.”

“Bye,” Malcolm tells Mae, having apparently forgiven her for the kick to the shin, and she yawns a reply in his direction before turning to follow the other girls to the left. 

Eileen doesn’t say a word as she leads them through the narrow doorway and up a winding, drafty, cramped stairwell, only halts after they’ve gone less than a dozen or so steps up. “The first year rooms begin here,” she says in that same, quiet, slightly husky voice. 

“Where are you going?” someone wants to know.

“Up,” she replies simply, and keeps ascending the stairs, her robes whispering after her.

The girls file into the first room, only to realize that it only has four beds. Fortunately, the names are on the door in stenciled letters. After some confusion and tired bickering, Mae finds a door with her name on it, shoves it open far too hard, and is reward with a muffled yelp of pain as she steps into the room, already tearing off her blazer and loosening her tie. 

“I thing my nofe ith bleedin,” someone says darkly, through their hands. 

Mae is too tired to acknowledge whoever was dumb enough to stand right in front of the door. She makes a beeline for the bed with her suitcase on it, and after hoisting herself up onto the high matress, collapses face down, kicking off her shoes one by one. 

“What is wrong with you?” someone peevishly asks, but she just makes a muffled grunting noise and refuses to speak to any of them until things have quieted down and the lights have gone out. Only then does she reluctantly rouse her to change into her pyjamas, slip into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and then shuffle straight back to bed. If she spares a thought for Mum during any of it, it’s only enviously that the professors must have the run of the castle all night along. 

Maybe they have a private party in the teachers’ lounge, with extraordinary amounts of hard liquor and music and dancing and cigarettes. That’s what she’d be doing, if she was a professor. She’d install an opium den, like in a Sherlock Holmes novel where all the disgraced aristocrats and tortured artists and melancholy students gather to slump gracefully across the divans while someone badly plays the piano.

When she wakes, it’s after a very strange dream involving a jazz club played exclusively by ghost bands and a skeleton detective combing through the crowd in an overcoat and top hat. The curtains in the room have all been pulled back, and the other three beds are not only empty, but made. Mae rolls over, mumbling to herself, and comes face to face with a pair of very irked hazel gold eyes, before they wink out of existence. Only after a few minutes of thinking does it occur to her that she might be impeding the house elves in their tidying. 

By the time she’s showered, dressed, and collected her things, it’s ten to eight. Mae passes through the deserted common room, out the door, and then sets about trying to find the Defence classroom, seeing as that’s her first class of the day, and the year. As it turns out, the Fat Friar helpfully informs her, after some initial chatter inquiring about her mother, Defence this year is being taught on the sixth floor, which means she’s just gone down several flights when she ought to have gone up. By the time she finally locates the proper room, it’s ten past eight, and while Mae wouldn’t say she’s nervous, exactly, she does push open the door with a hint of foreboding.

The classroom, to her dismay, is deadly quiet. A sea of Ravenclaw and Gryffindor heads swivel to face her from their neat rows of desks. Mae’s never sat at a desk in her life. Professor Carmody pauses, her back to the class and Mae, in front of the board, the chalk floating in the air beside her. Slowly, expectantly, she turns, as Mae shuts the door behind her and skirts into the classroom, looking for an empty seat.

“Miss Benson,” Carmody says in a voice that is neither cold nor warm, curt nor kind. It just… is. As if she’s not all that shocked by any of this, but neither is she inclined to be very lighthearted about it. “How terribly kind of you to join us. May I ask what was so exciting that you just couldn’t tear yourself away in time for my class? A duel in the courtyard? A troll rampaging through the village?”

There’s a few tense spurts of amused chuckles and sniggers. For the first time in her life, Mae feels a swoopy sensation of being publicly humiliated fluttering around in her gut, and her face turns bright pink. She never blushes like that. Ever. Mum says it’s because she’s shameless. Mae just likes to think she’s got excellent control over her circulatory system. Everyone is staring at her, everyone is watching, and she resists the urge to turn on her heel and run out of the room. 

“I got lost,” she says, clearing her throat, trying not to sound as embarrassed and angry as she feels. It’s not that she’s used to grownups being ever so nice to her, but Mum and the O’Neills never spoke to her like that, ever. It’s not fair. How was she supposed to know it’d be so hard to find the classroom? It’s not as though they were handing out maps. And why didn’t her roommates wake her up? “That was a little exciting, I s’ppose.”

“You suppose,” Carmody echoes her dubiously. “Well, I suppose I’ll be taking ten points from Ravenclaw, as you were ten minutes late to my class. Let’s not make a habit of this, Miss Benson.” She scans the room briefly, and Mae notices that her green eyes almost exactly match the fern green of her silk blouse with the tie at the neck and her floral patterned skirt. “Take a seat beside Mr. Amory. John?”

John Amory raises his hand, looking as though he’d rather be anywhere else, and Mae, still flushed, takes the seat beside him in the back right corner of the room, noting his vivid scarlet Gryffindor tie and crest. “You interrupted her right at the good part,” he mutters in disapproval. Mae pulls a face, takes out her parchment, quill, and ink, and hunches defensively over the ancient wooden desk, covered in graffiti dating all the way back to the turn of the century. 

“The Dark Arts,” Carmody continues, her chalk rasping across the large blackboard once more, “are known by many different names and phrases across our world. They also ascribed different definitions, limits, and attributes in various cultures. In the English speaking countries, of course, we know them as the Dark Arts, or black magic, although that is considered a confusing and somewhat dated term. Our most general legal definition of them states that the Dark Arts are, simply put…” She glances back at them, expecting an answer.

A Ravenclaw hand shoots up. “Yes, Miss Byrd?”

“Magic meant with ill-intent.”

“Five points to Ravenclaw. A limited but more or less accurate answer. Jinxes, hexes, and curses typically fall under the header of ‘dark arts’.” Carmody purses her red lips together. “Now, as we all know, very few spells are actually outlawed, but the majority of those that are, are curses. Jinxes and hexes are generally considered mean-spirited or malicious, but seldom do permanent, serious damage, although they can also incur significant legal trouble- and social stigma,” she warns, turning fully back around to face the class. 

“Chances are during your time here at Hogwarts, you will cast a jinx or hex on someone else, or be caught up in one yourself. Most of this will be written off as schoolyard antics, and usually, it is. But I would warn you against ever casting any type of magic without thought. Your magic is still being refined. In times of high stress or intense emotions, things can and will get out of hand. If you are found to have maliciously used magic against a peer while here at Hogwarts, you will not only find yourself in the Headmaster’s office, you may also find yourself expelled. As the Ministry is so keen to remind us all, your wand is a privilege, not a right. Do not jeopardize your magical power for the sake of settling a petty squabble.”

You could hear a pin drop inside the classroom, before the scratch of notes being taken starts back up again. Mae is slightly entranced, angry and vindictive as she feels about being reprimanded in front of the entire class like that. Carmody has an even, brisk pattern of speech and a very faint Irish accent that makes it difficult to zone out or dismiss her. She’s not speaking to them like children, but as if they were adults, grownups, with serious lives and serious jobs, not a bunch of kids in wrinkled uniforms who still have sleep crusted in their eyes and jam stains around their mouths.

“You will also hear,” Carmody continues her lecture, “about various dark wizards and witches, all of whom have been convicted of some magical crime or another, be that casting a deadly curse, brewing poisons for their enemies, or breeding dangerous magical creatures in the hopes of using them for profit or ill-gain. Some of these people have been incarcerated. Some are on the run. Others have been lost to history. And some of our most powerful figures of magical might…” she shrugs, “well, have been known to blur the lines between light and dark.”

Another hand raises. “Mr. Carstairs?”

“Like Morgana? She was a dark witch, wasn’t she? That’s why Merlin tried to kill her…”

“Morgan le Fay is certainly infamous for her blatant use of magical enchantments, curses, and potions to manipulate muggle rulers in and out of power, and to enshrine herself as their most trusted advisor and sorceress, yes,” Carmody says dryly. “But in some circles, the same is said of Merlin.”

There’s a few sharp intakes of breath. 

“But Merlin was the greatest wizard who ever lived,” a Ravenclaw protests.

“According to British magical history,” Carmody smiles like a razor’s edge. “As you grow up, you’ll learn that every magical community has their own distinct legends… and monsters.” She claps her hands together, startling a few students, who fumble their quills. 

“The purpose of this course is to teach you both how to identify dark magic, and how to defend yourself and others against it. You are living in a time of international peace and prosperity, compared to what the world looked like just two decades ago. People are going to tell you that you don’t need to know about certain things, in fact, that you are better off not studying the darker parts of our abilities at all. That is patently false. You may be young, but better you learn it now, in this classroom, than out in the real world, when it is just you and your wand against a whole host of unknown variables.”

The chalk floats back down to her desk. “Everyone up,” Carmody orders, and they all jump to their feet as one confused mass, pushing back chairs and desks. “Wands at the ready. I cannot begin to tell you how many wizards and witches have lost their lives because they decided to blindly stumble down a dark corridor or because they waltzed into a dimly lit room without taking the proper precautions. Everyone you encounter in our world has an easily concealed weapon on them that is capable of killing you in an instant. If you can’t see them or their wand, you are going to be in for a very rude awakening, ladies and gents! Together with me- lumos!”

“LUMOS!”

“Lumos maxima!”

“LUMOS MAXIMA!”

“Nox! And again!”

Despite a relatively peaceful (if achingly boring) Charms class following suit, Mae is still sulking by lunchtime, listening to Malcolm ramble on with one of his roommates, Alec Carstairs, about quidditch. Malcolm might claim he was put out when he found out he’d have to be a wizard and not a doctor, but he’s certainly not complaining about the prospect of seeing quidditch matches up close and personal. Alec’s uncle is apparently a referee for the International Quidditch League or something like that. He gets to travel all around the world and he’s only been hospitalized twice in the past six months. 

Mae thinks quidditch is fun to watch, but she has absolutely no desire to hop on a broom anytime soon. In theory, flying might be enjoyable. On an airplane. With comfortable seats. And meal service. She doesn’t really see what’s so appealing about willingly exposing yourself to wind, lightning, hail, rain, snow… In the middle of finishing off her roast beef sandwich, she hears a familiar voice from across the table, and looks up, narrowing her eyes immediately. 

Shrill Girl looks back at her, and then her cheeks turn as red as her pug nose. She’s got a round face, hazel eyes framed by wire spectacles, and her straw blonde hair is contained to two neat braids. “You,” she says. “You banged the door into me last night!” She nudges the girl next to her, a redhead busy slathering an English muffin with apricot jam and honey. “Valerie, it’s her!”

“So we meet again,” says Valerie, whose hair is truly a shocking shade of dark red, verging on auburn, with the dark eyebrows and prominent forehead to match, who Mae truly does not recognize in the least, although she doesn’t really sound all that offended, more entertained. She points her butter knife accusingly at Mae. “The black sheep of the dormitory. Have you come to apologize?”

“Apologize for what?” Mae demands, conscious of the fact that Malcolm and Alec have stopped discussing Puddlemere United and are now watching this with great interest. “Do I know you?”

Valerie huffs. “Mary-Anne, can you believe-,”

“It’s Marian,” someone says coolly, “for the hundredth time.” Marian has olive skin and a very modern black pageboy cut that curls up at the end, framing her square jaw. She looks to Mae, and after a fortifying sip of her pumpkin juice, says calmly, “They’re upset with you for being so rude last night. Also, you gave Christine a nosebleed. She bled for six minutes straight. It got on the rug. It was disgusting.”

“You’re my roommates?” Mae hadn’t really been thinking about them at all, beyond her annoyance at being left behind this morning. “When did you get up? When I woke up everyone was gone!”

“Right,” says Valerie, “well, we thought about waking you up, but then we thought we’d rather just go eat breakfast without you. Seeing how Mary-Anne tripped over your _shoes_ -,”

“It’s Marian,” Marian snaps. “Are you deaf?”

“Look, you just don’t look like a Marian-,”

“And I look like a Mary-Anne?!”

“Sorry,” Mae is unapologetic about interrupting this argument, “you let me sleep in because you were angry I came into the room _too loudly_ last night and left my _shoes out_?” She is incredulous. 

“You gave me a bloody nose,” Christine barks. “Can you just say sorry? It’s still red!”

“Maybe that’s how it looks naturally,” Mae is unimpressed. “Some people have blotchy skin. Have you got any pictures to compare it with?”

Valerie whistles under her breath. Alec Carstairs is very excited to be witnessing his first ‘cat fight’. Malcolm has become so engrossed in the drama that’s he’s slopped milk down his tie. 

Christine is speechless; she looks to Valerie and Marian, then back at Mae, then scrambles out of her seat, rattling dishes. “I’m going to the library to study,” she snaps. “Are you coming, or not?”

It’s very clear that this invitation was not directed to Mae. Valerie crams the rest of her muffin in her mouth and makes a gargled noise of assent, snatching up her bag. Marian sighs, finishes her pumpkin juice, and slowly gets up to follow, giving Mae a look.

“I think they’re overreacting a bit,” Mae says defensively. “It was an accident!”

“It goes both ways,” Marian retorts, as if speaking to a small child. “You’re inconsiderate of us, we’re not going to be very considerate of you, are we? The least you could do is say sorry and clean up your messes.” With that, she straightens her blazer and walks off after them, leaving Mae to stew. 

Alec snickers. Malcolm punches him on the shoulder. “Leave her alone.” To Mae, “You’re not going to cry, are you? Because I don’t think- I don’t think you should do that here, maybe, you look kind of-,”

Mae jumps up from the table, glances up and down the length of the hall, and takes off, her shoes slapping against the floor. She doesn’t go back up to the Ravenclaw Tower, or to the library to harangue her dormmates into forgiving her- instead she cuts outside and through a sunny courtyard full of glass-paneled windows looking into various offices and classrooms, until she recognizes a familiar figure at a desk. Mae scrambles up onto an low, ivy covered wall, twigs crunching underfoot, and raps on the glass.

Mum looks around from her desk, frowning, and then rolls her eyes at the sight of her. Mae moves out of the way as she opens the window, swinging it outwards, and then neatly wriggles inside, jumping down from the windowsill and onto the floor. “I have a door,” Mum says flatly, pointing towards said door. “With my name on it. What are you doing, Mae?” She checks her watch. “When is your next class?”

“Potions with you at one,” Mae replies automatically; she may have gotten lost this morning, but she did memorize her class schedule. “What’re we doing? Can I skip it?”

“We’re doing laboratory safety and a materials inventory,” Mum says, pushing her towards an empty chair on the other side of the desk. The office is small, the walls covered in sturdy bookshelves, but warm and cozy, brimming with plants, a big potted fern in one corner and flowers on the windowsill. It smells like chamomile tea. Mae sniffs around. 

“Got any biscuits?”

“You haven’t had lunch?” Mum sighs, sitting down. “You need to remember to eat during the day, not just at dinner-,”

“I have, but it was awful,” Mae says tightly, drumming her fingers on the desk. “I was late to Defence-,”

“Mae-,”

“It wasn’t my fault! I was only late because I slept in because no one woke me up! They snuck out this morning and went to breakfast without me! And then when I came in Carmody got all pissy with me and wanted to know why- it’s the first bloody day, that’s why! And everyone was looking at me, and she made me sit next to John Amory, who is extremely obnoxious, Mum, he is, and she gave us tons of homework, and then at lunch everyone was acting like I murdered someone because I banged into Christine and she got a nosebleed-,”

Mum is staring at her in bafflement. “Who is Christine? You gave her a nosebleed?”

“My roommate! Well, one of them, I hit her with the door last night, but it was an accident, I swear, but they were all annoyed because I-,” she hesitates.

“You what?” Mum probes, brows furrowing.

“I guess I wasn’t very _considerate_ last night,” Mae mutters under her breath.

Mum exhales. 

“I didn’t say or do anything awful, I just wanted to go to bed, and maybe I should have been a little more neat about it, but they were up whispering and talking, and it was really annoying-,”

“You can’t leave your things lying about,” Mum says, massaging the bridge of her nose. “Alright? I know you don’t mean anything by it, but it’s very irritating for other people. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot-,”

“Wrong leg, maybe, at this point!”

“Right.” Mum leans back in her wingback chair, and clasps her hands across her stomach. “It’s good that you want to make amends, Mae. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with these girls, and it’ll be a lot better for everyone if you can be friends. Or at least pleasant with each other.”

“I don’t want to be their friend, I just want them to stop treating me I’m horrid,” Mae mutters. “I’m not horrid. I’m brilliant.”

“Brilliant and very humble about it,” Mum is a little too snide for her liking. “Look. These things happen. It’s your very first day of school, you’re nervous, I’m sure they are too-,”

“They are not! They’re all the best of friends all of a sudden!”

“Well, girls can be like that.” Mum pauses. “Trust me, I know-,”

“Oh, come off it!” Mae snorts. “You were really popular in school, Auntie V says so.”

“I don’t know about that,” Mum mutters, although she gives a wry little smile. “But a little kindness can go a long way, you know. You should just try to settle things with them. Apologize. Be the bigger person-,”

“Ugh,” Mae says in disgust. “Here we go. _Turn the other cheek, Mae. Be gracious, Mae. Apologize, Mae._ I’m not in Hufflepuff, alright? We’re not just going to sit down and- and all hold hands, and talk about our feelings-,”

“I’m sorry,” Mum sips at her tea. “I didn’t realize you were in Ravenclaw, the house of petty grudges and bloody noses.”

Mae glowers at her, then concedes, “Point.”

“Thank you. I’m not saying you have to like them. But you are going to be living with them for the next seven years. You don’t want to give them reasons to poke holes in your pillow or leave frogspawn in your shoes,” she warns. 

Potions isn’t what Mae would call illuminating, since she’s heard this spiel a thousand times over, but Mum does do her a favor when she gives Christine 10 points to Ravenclaw for being able to list the ten most common potions ingredients. “Excellent memory, Miss Applewhite,” Mum praises, and a moment later Christine glances from Mum to Mae, obviously making the connection. 

After class Mae waits outside in the damp, dark corridor, waiting for the others to come out. Valerie strides out first, sees her, and pauses. Christine and Marian are talking quietly, and nearly bump into Valerie. “Hi,” Mae says, adjusting the straps of her satchel. “I’m sorry about the bloody nose, Christine. I should have watched where I was going.” Is she sorry? Well, not particularly, but like Mum says, sometimes you have to suck it up and do the ‘right thing’, even if you don’t really understand why at the moment. “And… sorry I left my things out. I’ll be neater from now on. Promise.”

Valerie shrugs; easily won-over, Mae surmises. Christine bites her lip until Marian elbows her. “We’ll make sure you get up on time from now on,” she finally says. “Carmody’s sort of scary, isn’t she?”

“I’m not scared of her,” Mae scoffs, but then amends, “maybe. I guess her scar’s kind of freaky.” Sometimes it makes people like you if you pretend to be scared of the same things as them. Mum says fear is a really powerful motivator. 

“I think it’s neat,” Valerie says, walking ahead of them again as Mae falls into step with Marian and Christine. “I heard she got it while fighting a street gang in Rio.”

“I heard it was a motorcycle accident,” Marian says, doubtfully. “But I don’t see how she’d drive one, with those heels-,”

Valerie scoffs, loudly. She seems to do everything loudly. “If Ginger Rogers can dance down a flight of stairs in high heels, I think Professor Carmody could drive a motorcycle-,”

“I have no idea who that is,” Christine complains, looking to Mae and Marian for support. “She keeps doing this-,”

“Did you see her in _Tight Spot_?” Mae demands of Valerie, who brightens as they approach the narrow stairwell.

“Are you muggle too, then?”

“Muggleborn,” Mae says, although ‘mudblood’ is rooted somewhere in the back of her mouth, biding its time. “We’re not muggles.”

By the time they all reach the first floor of the castle, they are very nearly friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. "I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent" was a legitimately popular song in 1957 aimed at encouraging kids to stay out of trouble. You can't make these things up.
> 
> 2\. I don't want this fic to drag too much, so we will be jumping to October next chapter, which will be from Amy's POV, where we'll get to see how she's handling teaching, and where we will also briefly be leaving Hogwarts for a visit to London. I know this chapter was pretty lighthearted and mundane, but the majority of this fic will not be, in case anyone was worried.
> 
> 3\. The main 'point' of this chapter was to show Mae interacting with kids her own age and her struggles with that, and to show off June Carmody's uh... 'unique' teaching style. As we can see, she seems to take her job very seriously and has very little interest in sheltering her students. She's also a bit of a hardass, as Mae finds out firsthand. 
> 
> 4\. I can't imagine being Minerva McGonagall's younger sibling could be very easy, no matter how smart or talented you are. I also like to headcanon that the McGonagall we see as an older adult woman in canon is in some ways much more mellow than she was as a teenager/young woman. So yes, she is a bit cocky and has very high expectations for herself and others. We'll see more of her and Eileen Prince next chapter in Amy's class.
> 
> 5\. Mae can be really self-centered and careless and isn't necessarily inclined to uh... win her peers over the same way either of her parents are. Basically she's used to the world revolving around her after a pretty solitary childhood, and it's sort of a shock to her system that not everyone feels obligated to like her and tolerate her shenanigans. 
> 
> 6\. I don't expect everyone to keep track of Mae's friends and classmates, but we will be seeing more of them throughout this fic. They're not all necessarily going to be crucial to the plot or play large dramatic roles, but I do want to show her making friends and not just changing and maturing due to you know, heaps of childhood trauma or shocking reveals of who is who's father. Realistically speaking most students at Hogwarts are probably going to first befriend their roommates and housemates before they branch out into inter-house friendships and whatnot. I was always disappointed in canon that for example, Dean and Seamus never play a larger role, given how much time they must have spent around Harry and Ron, or that Hermione never becomes closer with Parvati and Lavender.


	8. Amy IV

LONDON, OCTOBER 1957

Making conversation on any sort of public transportation has always been something of a faux pas, as far as Amy is aware, but she reckons no one’s ever had to worry about that on the Knight Bus. Eleven sickles for a half hour ride from Hogsmeade to London, they were promised, and that’s quite the steal compared to even taking the Hogwarts Express for a leisurely trip south, but the Hogwarts Express, or really any functioning locomotive, doesn’t make you feel as though you’re a hair’s breadth from death at any given moment. Amy has a very strong stomach, and after years of quidditch, apparating, and numerous rides in cabs, buses, and trains, has very little concern about being motion sick. 

Still, the Knight Bus puts even her iron guts to the test, and thirty minutes, however fast the bus is traveling as it zips from random stop to random stop, across bridges, up and down hills, through forests, and along the coast, still feels like an eternity. The bus is also dreadfully crowded, it being a sunny Saturday morning in October, and primarily populated by the elderly and mothers with children- anyone really who’s not in a state to go about apparating or flying from place to place. Amy gives up her seat to a heavily pregnant young witch, and for most of the perilous ride stands near the back, braced against a window alongside Lucinda Amell, wishing there was anything at all to hold onto.

Safety’s never been a very pressing concern for any magical invention, of course. Wizards regularly thumb their noses at guard rails and warning notices. As it turns out, magic is far from the cure for willful stupidity; it’s more of an encouragement, really. Try telling someone who can haphazardly levitate to be more careful on a roof. At this point Amy is hardly surprised, even if she was once the kind of girl who flung herself off a rocky cliff shelf and into the crashing waves because she’d a hunch her magic would protect her. Most days she wants to take that stupid little girl by the neck and shake her until her teeth rattle. 

When the bus does finally let them off, they’re in Whitehall, quite close to the hidden public entrance to the Ministry of Magic. Amy ignores the prickling sensation around her neck and spine, and tries to focus on the rare, bright autumnal sunshine spilling across the busy streets instead. Traffic is a bloody mess, and seemingly everyone and their mother, brother, and cousin are out and about, enjoying the good weather. Amy does her customary scan for anything strange and unusual, but it’s just a sea of unfamiliar faces with very familiar accents all swarming past and around her; men joking next to a wrought iron fence, teenagers hurrying around a corner, trailing cigarette smoke, a dog barking as its owner marches across the street, cars honking at one another, and in the distance, Big Ben is chiming fifteen past ten.

“Right,” this is the very first time Amy has ever seen her Madam Amell, or Lucinda, as she’s supposed to call her now, outside of a school environment, and it’s a little odd to not see her in her green and white infirmary uniform. Truthfully, Amy doesn’t know Amell’s background at all, although she suspects she is at least a halfblood, if not a pureblood, and she knows she has two grown sons, one married with children. A widow, she thinks; she still wears a ring but she’s never heard anything about a Mister Amell. Looking at her now, standing next to Amy on the very muggle sidewalk of a very muggle street, she could be any other proper looking woman in her fifties, aside from her hair, which is unfashionably long and grey by muggle standards, now contained to a French twist burn at the back of her head. “Let’s be off, then. Nott will be handling your interview, and he’ll be up in arms if we’re late.”

The surname ‘Nott’ does not exactly conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings within Amy; she remembers an Alexander Nott from her school days. He was not the worst of Tom’s gang, but he was not what she’d call a little gentleman, either. The recurrent rumor was that his mother had tried to murder his father and wound up shut up in some wing of St Mungo’s on an insanity plea. “Which one?”

“Antony Nott. You wouldn’t know him; he was long before your lot. We were schoolmates back in my day,” Lucinda says dryly. “The ancient times of yore. Married to a Rosier, I believe. I never heard about any children. But then many of the older families have those… problems.”

“You don’t look a day over forty two,” Amy says diplomatically, nodding to her dark navy blue dress and and rich red coat hanging from her shoulders. Lucinda snorts, adjusts her white pillbox hat with a gloved hand, and has to hang back to match Amy in stride; she’s always been a tall woman and cuts through the crowds quite smoothly, mostly, Amy thinks, due to the fact that she looks as though she’s got money, and quite a bit of it. Amy probably looks like her assistant; hatless, gloveless, hair rumpled from the bus ride, hauling along a brown leather suitcase full of papers and potions ingredients that’s seen far better days than this.

“Tell me,” Amy fights to be heard over the chatter around them as they head for Smithfield. “What are the chances that they turn me away at the doors for wearing trousers to the interview?” In her defence, they are perhaps her very nicest pair of sleek black cigarette pants, and she ironed them just this morning- not a single wrinkle to be seen. The thin leather belt is brand new, too; thankfully Mae hasn’t had the chance to steal it yet. Surely the tailored blouse makes up for it; dark green, portrait collar, fake pearl buttons, and her ponytail scarf is coordinated to match. 

She is still vain and pragmatic enough to have spent a good long while on her appearance this morning; she hasn’t worn this much makeup since her first day on the job, and these kitten heels are brutal, but she’ll be damned if she walks into this standing just five foot three. It’s bad enough when half of her upper year students are taller than her. 

Her coat is a little shabby looking, so she’s going to take it off as soon as possible. Mae came to see her before she left, and made Amy do a spin so she could catcall her approval. What had she said? “Knock ‘em dead, kid.” At that Amy had sent her off to go brush her teeth and stop wandering about the castle in her pyjamas and slippers.

“Well,” Lucinda says neutrally. “They can hardly fault you for not wanting to brew a potion in a pencil skirt or flowing robes.”

“You said there’d be at least two evaluators,” Amy feels like she’s sixteen again, about to go into her OWLs, stomach a knot of nerves. Technically, she can’t be sacked from Hogwarts for being denied admission into MESP… She’d just be the first potions master to not, in fact, be afforded that rank by the Society. She knows she can do it. She’s just got to get over herself. “Nott and who else?” 

Lucinda exhales. “At this time, on the weekend? Someone without much of a personal life, I’m afraid. Remember to breath. Don’t worry about them, focus on the task at hand. Trust me, they’ve had to admit plenty of people they don’t like much before.” Seeing the look on Amy’s face, she adds, “Not that they won’t like you, dear. It’s just that you’re a little younger than what they usually see, and Slughorn did leave some rather large shoes to fill.”

Amy is willing to wager those shoes were not, in fact, kitten heels. “Do you know why he resigned?” She hasn’t dared ask before this; she’s hardly got any time as it is, between classes, planning for classes, marking homework, cleaning the classroom, and attending meetings with her fellow faculty. Everyone else seems to have quite comfortably found their rhythm now that they’re in the second month of the term. She still feels as though she were floundering in the wake of a line of very neat swimmers. 

Lucinda is silent for a moment as they come onto Giltspur Street. “I can’t say I do. I may be one of the more… senior faculty, but I am not, unfortunately, privy to everything. It came as a surprise to most of us. He’d never mentioned any thoughts of retiring now. I always imagined he’d at least see the next decade out. But Horace and I were never very close,” she smiles thinly. “School nurse is hardly the most illustrious of positions.”

“It’s the most important,” Amy retorts. “Putting everyone back together again. That’s powerful magic.”

“I see I taught you well,” Lucinda chuckles as the St Barts’ complex comes into view, the Henry VIII’s gate archway up ahead. Amy was rather mystified when she first realized this was where MESP’s headquarters were located, but she supposes it makes a certain sort of sense. Better to hide in plain sight, and all that. And she’s sure they make good use of the facilities. They pass the pathology building, cross the ancient courtyard into the North Wing, and head for the museum entrance, which should be closed on a Saturday. 

A woman seated at a small desk outside the locked exhibit looks up, and the instant their eyes meet Amy thinks witch. Not always- she can’t always tell just by looking at someone, particularly when they are in very muggle clothes, as this woman is, in a muggle building, in a muggle city, but when you know, you know. She can’t quite explain it; she supposes no one really can. “Good morning, Joan,” Lucinda says pleasantly, as they approach. “We’re just dropping in for an interview.”

Joan smiles, produces a key, unlocks the doors, and waves them through. The museum and archives are dark and cloistered, but they walk straight through towards the furthest most row of shelving. The witch Joan produces her wand and traces a line down the side of the shelving, and it sinks fluidly into the floorboards, leaving a solitary lift entrance in its wake. “You’ll want the third floor,” she says with a slight smile. “Nice seeing you, Lucinda.”

The lift looks like the ones at the Ministry; all Victorian metal grating, entirely see through, and extremely rickety. The doors jangle their way open, and the two of them slip inside; it’s barely big enough to hold more than a few reasonably trim adults. “Third floor, please,” Lucinda announces to no one in particular, and as Amy looks around curiously, it quite rapidly descends, much faster than it has any right to, down underground.

“I thought we might be going up,” she chokes out when it finally hits the right level with a bit more ‘oomph’ than is necessary. She can feel the vibration up her spine. “Should have known better.”

“We are a very subterranean sort of people, witches,” Lucinda reflects as the lift doors open once again. “But it does make things more convenient, doesn’t it? Imagine all the glamours we’d have to use for upper stories. Much better to be tucked away under the earth.”

Amy has no idea what the other levels of MESP look like, but the third level reminds her of the Ministry; there are long windows full of artificial sunlight spilling across the dark wood-paneled walls and floors, and the architecture and furnishing is at least a century in the past, if not more, slightly claustrophobic and dimly lit. The walls are full of tapestries and paintings, and the lobby they enter is lined with statues of notable potioneers, dating back to the pre-Roman times. There is no grand burbling fountain and reflecting pool in the center of the room, just the circular entrance to a winding staircase that goes even further down, descending into the dark.

As Amy watches, a wizard hurries up it with a young man who must be his apprentice or student. They both look very much as if something just blew up in their faces; hair askew and clothes stained and singed. “-Told you to properly dissolve the boomslang liver first-,” the elder man is hissing at the younger as they attempt to straighten out their robes. They make a beeline for what must be the lavatories and cloakrooms, muttering to one another angrily.

Lucinda and Amy deposit their things save Amy’s suitcase in one of said cloakrooms, and then Lucinda leads the way towards one of the many arched doorways. The numbers stenciled on the front seem to be the only way to tell them apart. They pause outside Chamber Eleven; Amy can’t hear any voices inside, but then again, the door seems to be quite sturdy, reinforced with metal bolts and whatnot. She supposes in case she causes a massive explosion, instantly incinerating them all to ashes. 

Lucinda Amell’s appraising hazel eyes meet her own. Amy swallows, adjusts her grip on her case, and squares her shoulder. “Ready.” Not really, but you’re never ready for anything like this, she’s learned by now. Sometimes you just have to soldier on and do it. She wasn’t ‘ready’ to be plunged into a war-zone and she wasn’t ‘ready’ to be a mother, and she wasn’t ‘ready’ to come back to Britain and yet here she is. Marveling at her own tenacity is likely going to tempt fate, though, so she shuts those thoughts up, and steps into the room.

Chamber Eleven looks quite like the Potions classroom at Hogwarts. It’s a dark, slightly musty and damp, windowless room lit only by torches and two grand fireplaces to her left and right. Instead of multiple smaller tables there is one long one to serve as a work-space, without a solitary little chair to rest in. At the head of the room, rather than a blackboard or desk, is a slightly raised platform and another table full of parchment and books. Two wizards sit behind it; one examining his pocket watch, as the door shuts with a hollow thud behind them.

Amy didn’t expect to know either of them, but she does recognize one by proxy. Unless this is a very odd coincidence, she’d be willing to bet money that the man to the left is related to Eileen Prince. He has the same hooked nose, long, sallow face, dark eyes and hair, big ears, and sharp cheekbones. Her father, maybe, judging by the crags in his face and the grey in his sideburns. The other man must be Antony Nott; he doesn’t look much like Alexander. He’s shorter than Prince, with very sharp, almost pinched features, bald, and as he snaps his watch shut, giving them a look that suggests they were cutting it a tad too close for his liking.

Still, both men stand, chairs scraping back, and come down from their post to greet them properly. “Lucinda, always a pleasure,” Prince says, taking her hand. Nott gives her a curter nod which Amell returns coolly. “Lucinda.”

“Tony,” she says. “How’s Therese?”

He seems slightly surprised she inquired, if only out of politeness. “Well. Very well. She was visiting with Gilbert and his wife today. You’ve met them before, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” says Lucinda, although it’s not clear from her tone whether she enjoyed that encounter. She steps back slightly, nodding to Amy, and adopting a more formal tone than Amy is used to hearing her speak with. “Miss Benson, I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Edgar Prince and Mr. Antony Nott. Both are senior members of MESP and they will be your evaluators today. Miss Amy Benson is the new Potions instructor at Hogwarts, gentlemen, and a certified Healer.”

Amy shakes both their hands briskly and lays her case down on the table. “Thank you for considering me.” She debates, then figures no real harm can come from it; “Mr. Prince, I think I have your daughter in one of my classes; Eileen?”

Edgar Prince blinks in surprise, then says, “Yes, of course. How is her schoolwork coming along? She doesn’t write us half as often as her mother would like.” His tone is somewhere in between exasperation and vague fondness, as if discussing a pet more so than a child. But maybe she’s reading too much into it. Amy likes Eileen well enough, if only because she’s never a problem during class; she never says much of anything during class, at all.

Unlike Minerva McGonagall, who could do with holding her tongue once in a while. It’s not that the Gryffindor girl is a chatterbox; she just can’t resist correcting anyone. Be they a classmate or her professor. Amy has begun to dread seeing her stalwart hand up in the air. Minerva has absolutely no qualms about locking eyes with a teacher and refusing to break her gaze until she’s addressed. It’s not even that she’s wrong; she rarely is; it’s just that she’s a bit, well, very, irritating. If the rest of the class is often annoyed or exasperated with her; she shows no signs of caring. Apparently she’s been Gryffindor’s star chaser for years now. Maybe that has something to do with their tolerance of it.

Eileen, on the other hand, is usually sat hunched over her notes, furiously scribbling even when Amy isn’t lecturing. Amy has no idea what she’s writing there, but her work is impeccable, and she tells her father so now. “Eileen is exceptionally talented,” she says, as she opens up her case. They already have a cauldron and burner set up for her, but she knew better than to neglect to bring her own basic ingredients and gloves and knives. “If she chooses to go into Potions I’m sure she’ll do very well in this field.”

“It’s something of a family legacy,” Edgar Prince allows, “but I’m glad to hear she hasn’t been a disappointment. Her mother and I would hate to see her shrinking from her potential.”

Amy has no idea what he means by that, but she’s not here to analyze Eileen Prince’s relationship with her stuck-up father. She smiles politely as Nott and Prince return to their seats. Lucinda remains standing beside her. What follows is a basic interrogation. They confirm her name, date of birth, year of graduation, and exam scores. She presents her Hogwarts diploma, her Certification of Healing Magic, and rattles off her identification number with the international registry. She provides the name and address of her previous place of employment, and verifies her letters of recommendation from Albus Dumbledore and Lucinda Amell.

Then Amy steps into a corner of the room where a muffling charm is in full effect, and watches as Amell is questioned as to her proficiency in Potions. After a few minutes, she’s waved back to the center by Nott, and Lucinda is preparing to take her leave of them. “I’ll be waiting outside for you in the lobby,” she tells Amy, then mouths ‘good luck’ before leaving the room.

The darkened chamber seems suddenly more foreboding without her presence. Amy shifts, heels scraping against the floorboards. Prince and Nott confer in hushed whispers for a few moments, then turn their attention back to her. This isn’t all that different from her NEWTs, but at least she didn’t feel like an insect under a magnifying glass then. Amy stares steadily back at them, her palms flat against the sides of her trousers, and then glances towards Nott when he speaks.

“Can you identify the three core ingredients in a Forgetfulness Potion to me, Miss Benson?”

Amy resists the urge to curl her lip back at him. This is first and second year level material. She has no idea if he’s lowballing her because she’s young, because she’s a woman, or because she’s muggleborn, but the temptation to roll her eyes before answering is strong. When she was fifteen she would have tried to assume the best intentions. At thirty she can’t afford that particular luxury anymore. She inhales, schools her expression into something more respectful, and answers.

“Two drops of water from the river Lethe, a crushed herbal paste of lavender and chamomile, two fresh sprigs of Valerian, and four mistletoe berries.”

“And what colour should a Forgetfulness Potion, when brewed properly, be?” Prince asks, steepling his fingers in front of him.

“Amber, the darker the better,” Amy says without hesitation.

She doesn’t have to examine their expressions to know that she’s correct. They carry on without much pause. 

“What is the difference between a brew and a concoction, Miss Benson?”

“A brew requires steeping, soaking, or boiling, a concoction is any type of mixture,” Amy has always hated to stand perfectly still during these sort of things; she eases up on her posture a little and steps back from the glossy wooden table. 

“What differentiates a draft from a draught?”

“A draft is drawn from a cask, like wine, a draught is drawn from a bottle,” she replies evenly.

By the time they get to “Describe a philtre,” she is actively pacing back and forth.

“A philtre’s purpose is to enchant or charm. All love and glamour potions are philtres.”

“An elixir and a tincture are both medicinal. But an elixir will almost always be aromatic, whereas a tincture is preserved in some alcoholic solution.”

“The quickest method of brewing an antidote is in a copper cauldron; it will heat faster and hasten the brewing time.”

“When a sleeping draught is heated too quickly, the resulting potion can induce seizures or fainting fits.”

“A bezoar will serve as an antidote for most poisons. In the event that it does not counteract the poison, a small dose of Draught of Living Death will slow the effects of the poison in time for a healer to be summoned.”

“Golpalott’s Third Law states that _The antidote for a blended poison will be equal to more than the sum of the antidotes for each of the separate components_.” 

“Amortentia will always smell of what the imbiber finds most attractive and alluring. It has no taste and very little colouration. It is very difficult to identify a victim of Amortentia, but symptoms include a pale and sickly appearance, verbal tics, tremors in the extremities, loss of appetite, and insomnia.”

“The effect time of a Polyjuice potion varies dramatically based on the skill of the brewer. When brewed under the most ideal conditions and with the highest grade ingredients, a single dose can last up to twelve hours.”

By the time they seem to have run out of questions to ask her, she could have been pacing in front of them for just a few minutes or nearly twenty. Amy’s voice is hoarse from speaking so quickly by the end of it, and Prince and Nott seem tired themselves, finally shuffling their notes aside and adjusting their chairs. 

“Very well,” Nott finally says. “You have one hour to brew a sample of Draught of Living Death for us. All ingredients have been provided. Please begin.”

She’s been waiting for this; Amy will take the practical portion of any test over the questions and answers section any day. She rolls up the flimsy sleeves of her blouse, ignoring the look the two men exchange, changes out of her heels and into the close-toed, sensible work boots she brought in her suitcase, and double-checks the security of her ponytail. Then she slips on her dragonhide gloves, picks up her wand in one hand, her small paring knife in the other, and begins.

If they were expecting to endure the next hour in silence aside from the occasional murmur to one another, they are about to be sorely mistaken. Amy prefers to speak while she brews; it helps her calm down and she finds it soothing, even if she’s only talking to herself. Tom always hated it; he didn’t take Potions as seriously as Transfiguration or DADA, but he hated to turn in anything less than his best work, and he frequently complained about her ‘distracting’ him with her ‘inane chatter’. Of course, Amy was also fond of pointing out his mistakes, no matter how minor, so it wasn’t entirely him being overly sensitive. 

She can still remember the time in fourth year when he nearly flubbed his Hiccoughing Solution; he was about to stir it clockwise instead of counterclockwise when she reminded him, calling out to him from across the room while she was getting more dandelion roots. He’d gone beet red in mortification and fury, while the rest of the class had been quietly (and not so quietly) amused; perfect Tom, top marks at all times, nearly botching an intermediate potion? She’d felt a bit bad when she returned to her seat and found him hunched over the cauldron, scowling, but any sympathy had quickly faded when he ‘accidentally’ pushed her cutting board off the table, forcing her to waste valuable time washing it before returning to their station. 

He never did know how to take criticism well.

Instead of mumbling to herself like a madwoman, or chattering on about her position at Hogwarts, she goes on the offensive as she measures out African sea salt and pours water. Prince and Nott may not be her ‘type’ of people and they may think she’s been all but catapulted into this interview via Dumbledore’s interference, but they’re still old men, and if she knows one thing, it’s that all old men enjoy hearing themselves talk. 

So she asks about their families, and it’s all smooth sailing from there. Edgar Prince is only too happy to recount his wife’s many attributes and charitable work- if there’s one good thing she’ll say about the Princes, it’s that, their disdain for their own child aside, they seem to have a decent marriage. And Antony Nott, while childless, is only too happy to rave about his younger sister and brother’s children and their various interests and hobbies. Amy ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ and nods appreciatively from time to time, all without really looking up from her work, and in spite of her cynicism and her annoyance with this entire process, finds herself warming to them slightly.

Slightly. There’s a fine line between ‘sweet old man’ and ‘cantankerous old bastard’, and they’re both straddling it like the cowboys in one of Mae’s silly films, but they’re not monsters, either. Prince recounts a family vacation to Cornwall when he was just a boy, and Amy chimes in about the trips the orphanage would take (although a highly sanitized version). Nott is surprisingly forthcoming about his wedding some thirty odd years ago; it rained and rained, apparently, and they were forced to make a run for the indoors, casting water repellant charms and holding umbrellas. 

In fact, she hasn’t spoken in minutes and Prince is still going on about a particularly quarrelsome business associate when Amy silently bottles her sample of Living Death and holds the small vial aloft, glowing pale pink in the dim lighting. Prince stops talking immediately, and Nott hurries to check his watch. “Fifty four minutes,” he says, and his tone of impress is less begrudging than it was when she had successfully answered seven questions in a row correctly.

Amy approaches their high table, and sets the vial before them. Prince lifts up a small cage from under the table, and she watches curiously as a pure white rat is given a small drop of the potion on the end of Nott’s wand. The rat’s tongue darts out to taste, then back in, and within a few seconds its wobbled and collapsed, fast asleep, its breathing drastically slowed. “Oh, good,” she says, “I was worried one of you might want to have a taste.”

To her surprise, Nott snorts in amusement, and Prince guffaws. Amy steps back from them, boots squeaking on the floorboards, stripping off her gloves. “Is that all?” she asks, ignoring the rumble of her stomach. She hasn’t eaten anything since last night; breakfast was hardly beckoning this morning. “Do you know when I can expect to hear back from the Society?”

The two wizards exchange yet another inscrutable look, and then Prince rises and extends his hand to her. “Welcome to MESP, Master Benson.”

“Your work is exemplary,” Nott says approvingly. “You maintained control of the brewing process, the colouration is highly accurate, and you demonstrated minimal waste of your ingredients. Your answers during the questionnaire process were fully formed and satisfactory. You have proven ample knowledge of the field and despite your lack of scholarly contributions…” 

He exhales. “You have plenty of first-hand experience. You will be required to attend monthly meetings in order to keep your membership. You will need to submit at least two peer-reviewed articles a year to one of our academic journals. You will be expected to attend our annual conference.”

“Your badge and robes will be sent in the mail,” Prince adds. “But consider yourself a member from today onward. You’ll be assigned an office space and granted open laboratory hours here. Our facilities are always open to you and any apprentices you take on.”

Amy has flushed pink in spite of her efforts to remain calm, cool, and collected. Most of this is just about appearances, but she can’t deny the giddy rush in her stomach. This something she’s good at, something she’s always been talented in, even when she was flunking a History of Magic test or butchering a Transfiguration equation. It does feel nice to have it validated, even if she’s exhausted and feeling a bit faint from inhaling all those fumes. Her eyes are irritated from the salt, too. She shakes both their hands again, thanking them earnestly, packs up her things, and lets them walk her out the door and back into the lobby.

Lucinda is sitting on a bench flanked by potted plants just a few yards away, chatting with two other witches. When she hears the door opening and shutting, she turns, sees Amy’s broad smile and Nott and Prince with her, and brightens, standing up and saying something to the other women. All three approach, and Amy is confused when Nott steps past her to kiss one of them on the cheek, before she realizes this must be his wife, and… not his daughter, but one of his nieces, maybe?

“Therese,” Edgar Prince is greeting the woman warmly; Therese Nott looks a good deal younger than her husband, no older than her early forties, if that, and her eyes are a startling shade of light green, almost perfectly aligned with her rich, dark auburn hair bound in a long plait to her trim waist. Her neck is pale and slender, like a swan’s. She squeezes her husband’s weathered hands affectionately, then turns to Amy, as does the young woman at her side, a head shorter than her.

“You must be the Miss Benson I’ve just heard so much about,” she says crisply, looking Amy up and down. “Therese Nott; I see you’ve already made a very good impression on Tony. They don’t let just anyone into MESP, you know!” 

Amy smiles back, uncertain if she’s being reminded of her ‘place’ or not. “I’m honored to be admitted.”

“Really, Aunt Tess, after that inquisition, I’m sure she’s well aware of the honor,” the younger woman laughs, soft and sweet, like windchimes, and warmly takes Amy’s hand in her own. Her skin is soft and creamy white; she couldn’t look more like peaches and cream, from her rosy pink lips to her green eyes, so similar to her aunt’s, to her strawberry blonde hair, kept in an elegant chignon at the nape of her neck. She’s so beautiful that Amy is momentarily perplexed by her mere existence down here, underground. It’s like seeing a butterfly come wafting into a coal mine. And she’s very young; she can’t be much older than twenty two or twenty three.

“Lydia Rosier,” she says, “charmed. _Absolutely_ charmed- Madam Amell’s been singing your praises for the past fifteen minutes! You can’t imagine,” she adds conspiratorially, eyes twinkling merrily, “how very jealous I am- I’ve been dying for a tour of this place, but Uncle Tony’s always holding out on us! Very secretive, these potions masters.” She releases Amy’s hand and smiles all the more as her uncle makes some gruff comment about protocol.

“Protocol’s all I ever hear about these days,” Miss Lydia Rosier sighs breezily, and suddenly it hits Amy like a bolt of lightning, because she knows this face, if only from a smudgy newspaper photograph, she knows this made-for-the-camera smile, and above all, she knows the name. She should have put two and two together when Lucinda mentioned Nott had married a Rosier. 

“Amy Benson,” she says, introducing herself to Tom’s spectacularly gorgeous, spectacularly young and cheery fiancee, a vision in a coral toned sheath dress with a matching floral purse in one hand, her spotless white gloves clasped tightly in the other. 

Amy is holding her much-abused heels in one hand, a battered suitcase in the other, having forgotten to change out of her workboots. Her hair is a frizzy mess after fifty minutes of standing over a cauldron. Her eyes are watering. 

There is no flicker of disdain or contempt from Lydia, although that would be a bit much- Amy’s sure she didn’t have the slightest idea of who she was until a few minutes ago. It’s not as if Tom goes around at parties recounting his adolescent romances. Amy just looks at her for a few moments, trying to imagine this bright young woman, looping her arm through her aunt’s with great affection, teasing her uncle, and insisting they go for lunch all together, she’s famished, truly, they walked over from the Ministry-

Well, she looks at her, and tries to picture her with Tom, even just sitting beside him at a dinner table. Amy’s not sure whether she should feel revolted, infuriated, or relieved. He’s moved on. Here is crystal clear proof that he has, unequivocally, moved on, at least in the practical sense. He might still want her head on a silver platter, but he’s not been starving himself into a ravenous frenzy all these years. He knows he needs some semblance of a mimicry of a normal life. 

He’s engaged to this- this _girl_ , Amy can’t even think of her as a grown woman, she’s too young, too fresh-faced and wide-eyed, and they will be married within the year and have a lovely house and a beautiful baby or two and that will be that. This is what he always should have had. Or, would have had. It seems inevitable now. She’s not immune, not made of stone. There are enough cracks between her armor for some old, childish jealousy to seep in, a few kernels of possessiveness, of wanting to shout ‘mine!’ and stamp her feet and pout.

But it’s just that. A remnant of a lifetime ago. She had him in the palm of her hand and she could very well have kept him there, only it would have meant him keeping her too, and that she could not tolerate. She had her chance, she took it, she scratched off that ticket, she went on her way. She kept the soft heart, and shed the soft skin a long time ago. There is that dully mortifying crush of ‘I had him first, you ignorant child, I taught him whatever he thinks he’s teaching you’ and then it’s gone. Acceptance, and then a wellspring of pity. She hopes for her sake he doesn’t love her. That would be kinder, really. Tom’s not very nice to the things he only likes, but he’s very often cruel to what he feels he needs.

“But we must,” Lydia is saying, looking between her aunt and uncle, Edgar Prince, Lucinda, and Amy eagerly. “Let’s go to lunch!”

“Darling, we had reservations-,”

“Then we’ll make new ones,” Lydia smiles winningly, “we’ve a perfectly lovely dining room here, don’t we? Remember the Yule party? It was so beautiful- I felt like I was in Versailles!”

“You’ve been to Versailles,” Therese reminds her, but they’re already off; she may come across as young and coddled, but Lydia Rosier has no qualms about taking charge, Amy will give her that. They follow after her down a long corridor, through the MESP library archives, and into a grand dining room with with an elaborate brocade ceiling capped in gold, large windows spilling more false sunlight across the long white dinner table, and a perfectly placed set of silver and chinaware already in position. Lydia pulls out her uncle’s chair for him with great gusto, then accepts her own offered seat from Edgar Prince with a beam. 

Amy sits beside Lucinda, across from Therese and her bubbly niece. There aren’t any waiters, or menus, and it’s only after watching the others order that she realizes she’s supposed to voice aloud what she wants to eat. The food itself can’t be conjured; it doesn’t appear instantly, but within a few minutes, after if brought up by an invisible dumbwaiter from the kitchens. Amy watches her cup fill itself with sparkling water while Lydia tries to charm a vivid description of the interview process from her uncle and Edgar Prince.

“You know,” she says suddenly, turning to Amy again, who is mid-sip of water and also mid-grimace; she’s never really liked fizzy drinks that much, despite her sweet tooth. “I was always terrible at Potions, really just awful- Has Aunt Tess told you about the time I nearly blew up the pantry? I never had the patience for it, if I’m being honest. I just hate having to wait for things to heat up,” she confesses with a smile of wry good-humour. “I’m afraid I’ll make a very poor cook.”

“Sweet girl, I don’t think your young man expects you to cook for him,” Edgar Prince is chuckling. “I can’t imagine your family letting you go with anything less than a legion of house elves.”

Amy stiffens ever so slightly in her seat, but otherwise commends herself on her poise as she sets her cup back down and begins to dig into her sandwich. She knew he’d come up sooner or later, and this will be good practice for the future. If she can keep it together and a smile plastered on her face in front of Tom’s own bloody fiancee, surely she can manage all the rest. This is just a one-off incident. Like as not, she’ll never speak to Lydia Rosier again after this. They hardly run in the same circles. Or… glide. She doesn’t think Lydia’s ever run anywhere in her life, poor girl. She’s probably been in a corset and petticoat for the past decade, at least.

“Oh no,” Lydia is suddenly a little sheepish, skimming her silver spoon through her soup. “I don’t think so- maybe just one or two, like Kit- you know Kit, don’t you, Uncle Tony? She’s so dear to me… Tom’s not terribly fond of the idea of us having elves.”

“I wasn’t aware he was pushing for that sort of agenda in the Wizengamot,” Lucinda Amell sounds vaguely surprised. “House elf liberation is usually only touted by the more-,”

“Oh, no!” Lydia bursts into a peal of laughter. “Of course not, it’s not that- He knows they only feel fulfilled when they have work to do, a house to defend- It’s just that he didn’t grow up with them, you see, so he’s a bit… wary,” she settles on, with a slightly bemused smile of ‘silly man, what can you do?’. “I think he’s afraid they’ll be spying on state secrets, or listening in on our conversations,” she looks around with demure pleasure as they all chuckle.

Amy manages a tight smile, and keeps her attention on her meal. She’s starving, and the roast beef here is, as it turns out, quite good. 

“Well, I’m sure you’ll win him over, dear,” Therese tells her niece as she sips gingerly at her tea. “You can hardly be expected to manage all those housekeeping charms and enchantments by yourself, it’s far too much work for one woman. You’d never get out of the house!”

“You’d do quite well in politics yourself, Lyds,” Antony exchanges a shared smile with Edgar Prince, and Amy sees it for what it is; a joke, and a really clever one, they think, at that, at the mere idea of a pretty young girl like Lydia ever standing before the Wizengamot in red robes and hat, commanding the floor. 

She thinks she detects the briefest, intriguing flash of irritation in Lydia’s green eyes, before she just huffs in amusement. “I don’t know about that, Uncle. Half of Tom and I’s conversations is just him explaining all the codes and policies to me! But it’s very important work, of course, and we’re so lucky to have him. He’s just what the Ministry needs right now; a breath of fresh air.” 

“Of course,” Edgar Prince nods approvingly, “very accomplished man, he is. And hard-working, to boot. Nothing handed to that one.”

Amy has to pinch her own thigh to keep herself from making some kind of derisive noise. 

“And less than a month to election day,” Nott says. “It’s sure to be an interesting one. I don’t think people have been this excited about an election in years.”

“Well, it only comes around every seven,” Lydia retorts, and sips at her soup, before her gaze alights once more on Amy. “But come now, we’re boring everyone with all this politics rubbish.” She waves a hand at her aunt’s startled exclamation. “Yes, yes, I know, but I want to hear from our guests! So… how is the term going so far?” she inquires of Lucinda and Amy. “You know I love to hear about Hogwarts. I’m still jealous!”

Amy’s brow furrows in confusion, before Therese says carefully, “Lydia was educated at home. I served as her governess. She suffered from very poor health as a child.”

“Oh,” says Amy, genuinely caught off guard. “I’m sorry. I hope you’re doing better now, Miss Rosier.”

“Never better,” Lydia assures her, then grins. “And I don’t want to hear any ‘Miss!’. You’ll make me feel like a little girl all over again. Besides, it won’t be for much longer, will it?” She raises the slender hand with her sparkling engagement ring, flushing pink. 

Amy feels as though she had just been walloped in the chest, but disguises it with another long drag of her water. No. She is not going to think about that. She is going to keep calm and get through this. Of course she has a ring. It’s the done thing. What else was he going to get her, a pair of socks?

 _Maybe a nice pair of pearl earrings_ , a voice snarls in her ear.

Lucinda tells Lydia about the most amusing injuries thus far this term, and Amy gives a surface level summary of what she’s taught; not much, at this point. The first two weeks were mostly just basic safety and review of prior years; she wasn’t sure what they’d all spent much time on in their old curriculum. Lydia, to her credit, maintains an unnatural level of attention as if they were recounting a life or death experience, and when they’re finished, seems genuinely gratified. 

“I’ve told Tom that once he’s Minister, I want to shadow a governors’ tour of the school,” she admits sheepishly. “Just so I can see for myself, the once. I think he thinks I’m kidding him, but I’m really serious! Education is so important, and we use such an outdated system…” she sighs. “But enough about that. I heard you used to work as a healer in Gibraltar, Amy. What was that like? Was the weather very nice? I’ve never been; we had a little tour of the continent when I came of age, but we stuck to Barcelona and Madrid.”

Amy tenses again, but Lydia could have heard about that through anyone. Lucinda, for example. It’s not as if she can go around acting as though she’s been hiding for the past decade. That would rather nullify the entire point. No one is supposed to know you were hiding in the first place, like the game. She and Tom would play with each other, because the other orphans often refused to let them in on their games; their magic was too much of a cheat, although no one knew that was why they’d go hours without being found, often in plain sight. 

It was only really ever a challenge when they played with each other. Tom usually made her be the seeker, but occasionally he would relent and let her hide first. She can still recollect being hunched on her hands and knees under the dining room table, watching his feet circle the room from under the table cloth, holding her breath. He’d walked towards the kitchen, and then, as she made to silently scurry out and run out the door, doubled back and caught her, his arms locking around her as she tried to wriggle away, snickering and kicking at him. 

“I always know where you are,” he’d bragged, although his pale face had bright spots of color in it from running around all afternoon. “You’re not even a very good hider.”

She’d shoved at him, wrinkling her nose. “And you’re not a very good liar.”

Now she straightens in her seat and says, “It was wonderful. The weather is really lovely, and it was a good opportunity to pick up Spanish.”

“That explains why I heard a certain little girl calling someone a pendejo in the north courtyard the other day,” Lucinda says dryly, and Amy bites down hard on the inside of her cheek. They’d very nearly gotten through this without any mention of Mae.

Therese Nott and her husband blink a little, and Edgar Prince says in surprise, “You have a daughter?”

“¿Cómo se llama tu hija?” Lydia asks, unruffled, eyes gleaming with interest.

“Mae,” Amy says, clearing her throat. “Se llama Mae. A first year.” This is alright, she tells herself. It’s nothing he didn’t know before. Every Hogwarts student is registered with the Ministry’s Board of Governors. He could easily get access to the list. She isn’t revealing anything he wasn’t already aware of. But somehow saying it aloud feels wrong. Like she’s exposing herself in public. Like she’s sewing a scarlet letter onto her chest. 

Well, better for Nott and Prince to find out after they accepted her into MESP. She doesn’t anticipate a quick rescindment. Men like this put their pride first; they told her to her face she was in, and shook on it. She’s in. 

“Mae,” Lydia seems to test it on her tongue. Amy studies her intently for a moment, trying to find some hint of ulterior motives or cold calculation, but there is nothing. She seems about as interested and maybe even a little excited as one would expect, like she’s just encountered an intriguing new species of animal. The unwed mother and her illegitimate child. Fascinating. “That’s such a darling name. Well, if she grows up to be even half as accomplished as her mother, I think you can be very proud.”

Amy smiles back blandly, and then glances down at what’s left of her lunch, finding that her appetite has vanished about as quickly as it appeared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. There's no canonical location for the headquarters of MESP, so I made one up hidden underneath the St Bart's Hospital Museum in Smithfield London. Significant creative liberties have been taken. I sometimes find the more mundane magical bureaucratic stuff really interesting and fun to write about, so I apologize if everyone was bored silly for the first half of this chapter. I mostly just wanted to show that Amy does know her stuff, but still had to work hard to be accepted.
> 
> 2\. In case anyone was really confused about the familial relations: Antony Nott is the husband of Therese Rosier, Lydia's aunt (her father's older sister). They have no children but are clearly close with their niece. Therese was very involved in Lydia's upbringing; she educated her at home. So that's the explanation for why Lydia would just be popping in with her aunt. Edgar is Eileen's father, as mentioned in Lydia's chapter 3. 
> 
> 3\. I really did not want the interactions between Lydia and Amy to be focused on 'step away from my man'. Both of them have lives and motives not limited to him, and I wanted to put them on more equal footing, without it being Lydia going into some kind of random jealous rage, or Amy hating her on sight. In regards to Amy being like 'he's moved on', I think she is taking the fact that Tom has a very 'suitable' fiancee in Lydia as reason to believe he's not exactly setting himself up for Proposal Attempt #2 with her. In fact, Amy is willing to bet he just straight up wants to kill her. (Of course, we've yet to hear from Tom himself on this matter).
> 
> 4\. Yes, Lydia is one of those 'let's do brunch!' girls. In a modern AU she would be all about instagramming her omelette and green tea. 
> 
> 5\. Amy speaks decent French and Spanish from her time abroad, tolerable Italian, and really shitty German. Her accent is awful. 
> 
> 6\. Next chapter should be Halloween, because every HP fic has to have a Halloween chapter. It may also cover Martinmas aka November 11th aka Election Day, not sure yet. POV is up in the air at the moment, but it won't be from Amy's perspective.


	9. Mae IV

HOGWARTS, OCTOBER 1957

Mae spends the last Friday afternoon of the month in a tense standoff with the Flying instructor, Mister Nicholas Tittensor. Since the Ravenclaws share Flying with the Slytherins, who are unsurprisingly very good at coming up with nicknames, he’s known almost collectively to the first years as ‘Mister, My Tits-are-Sore’ or just Tits. Mae accidentally referred to him as Tits in front of Mum last week, and got a slipper lobbed at her head for her trouble. Fine, fine. It’s ‘incredibly disrespectful’ and ‘extremely inappropriate’ to refer to a ‘tenured staff member’ with a ‘highly offensive nickname’ especially when you are ‘currently flunking his class’. 

Hence the standoff. Mae doesn’t like flying. She doesn’t want to fly. She sees no reason to fly. Tittensor disagrees. Strongly. He’s a wiry grey-haired man in his mid forties with weather, sun-ravaged skin and bleary brown eyes. In spite of this he’s got a bellow like a bloody foghorn, and Mae can think of about a thousand things she’d rather be doing on a sunny Friday afternoon than little loop-de-loops in the air outside the castle. Usually, she exerts the bare minimum of effort required in Flying, which means it took three weeks of classes before she actually made herself sound commanding enough to even get the broom to spring off the ground and into her hand. 

Now she’s the last (wo)man standing in class, yet again. Tittensor dismissed the rest of them for the day nearly forty minutes ago. It’s just Mae, him, and Malcolm and Valerie looking on, the only two who care enough to cheer on her defiance. Well, not really. They just think it’s funny and have nothing better to do. Christine and Marian left in a huff ages ago, probably for the library to get a head start on their homework. The first quidditch match of the year is tomorrow, Saturday, and no one’s sure how long it will last. It could be finished in under an hour, it could take up the entire day. Mae might loathe Flying class, but she is looking forward to the game. Anything could happen. Someone could plummet to their death. Or be struck by lightning and get superpowers. 

“Two laps around the courtyard,” Tittensor is standing firm, muscled arms folded across his chest. Mae hovers in the air just above him, not even astride on the broom, although she is wearing trousers. They let the girls wear those for Flying, Herbology, and Care of Magical Creatures now. Mae has no opposition to flying because she feels it’s unladylike. She doesn’t want to be a proper lady. She just doesn’t really want to cave to old Tits. “Two laps,” he repeats himself irately. “And you can go, Benson. You need to work in tandem with the broom-,”

“I don’t want to work with the broom. The broom and me, we’re not friends,” she points out. If the broom underneath her could be growling, it would. Every so often it gives a little jerky shake, like it’s debating bucking her off. She crosses her dangling ankles, examining the grass stains on her shoes. 

Tittensor is unimpressed. “Two laps, or I’ll have you out here until dinner. This is ridiculous.”

“You can’t have me out here that long. There’s child labour laws.”

“You’re not labouring in the least, Benson.”

“Labouring to be a pain in the arse!” Valerie hollers from the sidelines, then gives Tittensor a thumbs up when he scowls in her direction.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with your generation,” he says in exasperation. “It’s like pulling teeth with you kids. No motivation. No sense of direction. Yes, you need to learn how to fly. It’s a crucial life skill. This is how witches have been getting around for centuries-,”

“But we have apparition now,” Mae drawls, picking at her cuticles. “So I really don’t see, sir, why it’s so ‘crucial’-,”

“Not everyone can apparate, Benson!”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it?” Mae offers. Truth be told, she’s on the verge of cracking, pride aside. The sun is shining directly in her eyes, her back hurts from sitting like this, and the broom seriously seems to be considering flying directly into the nearest stone wall and splattering her across it. 

“Two laps and I won’t take twenty points from Ravenclaw for this,” he snaps. 

That finally rouses her. As much as she wants to pretend that she doesn’t care how many points they take, the truth is that she’s already something of a public enemy. In the past two months of school, Mae has lost Ravenclaw a grand total of 55 points for various uniform infractions, demerits for running in the halls, showing up late to class, neglecting to complete her homework, ‘mouthing off’ to professors, and ‘creative interpretations of her essay prompts’. If Binns didn’t want two feet on her opinion of human-centaur political relations (the humans got what was coming to them in the Cheshire Stampede of 1806), he should have specified.

She’s also, in her defence, gained Ravenclaw about 35 points for ‘outstanding classwork’- she was one of the first to turn her match into a needle in Transfiguration, but apparently that doesn’t really balance out. What does she care? House points are completely arbitrary anyways. It’s just the prefects all keep giving her dirty looks, and she’s sick of people refusing to pass her things at lunch and dinner. 

“Fine,” she sighs, swings her legs over, leans forward, and urges the broom into motion by ‘willing it’, whatever that really means. What follows is two exceedingly awkward, halting laps, but laps nonetheless. She lands in a huff, battered school broom in hand. “Sir, maybe if we had better equipment-,” Tittensor is already walking back indoors, leaving her, Valerie, and Malcolm to put away the brooms back in the shed. 

“Way to stick it to the man,” Valerie claps her on the shoulder. It’s impossible to tell whether she’s joking or not. Most things are jokes with Valerie. Even Hogwarts seems half a joke to her, like she still can’t quite believe she’s here. Valerie is a Faraday ‘like the famous chemist, yeah’ from Exeter. Her father’s a railway clerk and her mum’s a homemaker, which is apparently what most people’s mums are these days, whether they’re magical or muggle. Mae has no idea how you ‘make’ a home every day, and assumes it involves a lot of dusting and scrubbing and shouting at your kids to get their acts together. Valerie’s parents prefer to ‘really not think about her being a witch’ which she claims is just fine with her, since at least she has something to lord over her prissy little sisters now. 

“If I’d known he was gonna make us put everything away too, I’d have left ten minutes ago,” Malcolm is grumbling as he hauls the last of the brooms into the dusty shed. 

Mae kicks the door shut behind them with gusto. “You’ve been in a mood all day. Is it ‘cause Minnie is playing tomorrow?” she goads at him, shoving at his arm as Valerie bursts into laughter. “Is poor Mal gonna have to watch her bring it home for Gryffindor-,”

He nimbly puts her in a headlock, dragging her forward as she snickers and repeatedly slams her sharp fingers into his stomach until he doubles over and releases her. “You’re not supposed to wrestle with girls, stupid!” She doesn’t mind, not really. Some of the boys won’t even talk to her or the other girls, or sit with them at lunch, either because they’re too nervous and awkward, or because they’re pigs and they don’t want to get dressed down properly. Malcolm has a sister and a ton of girl cousins he grew up with, and has no qualms about giving as good as he gets. 

“You don’t count,” he snorts, prompting a hoot from Valerie.

“Do I count, McGonagall?” 

“Not if you’re gonna hit me!” He dodges her mock boxer’s left-hook, shoves back at her, and the three of them go dashing under an archway and into the keep. 

The Ravenclaw v. Gryffindor match is set to begin at noon, presumably so no one complains if they miss lunch because of it. The mood among the Ravenclaws is particularly dour. Mae is a bit confused until Marian explains to her that it’s because the Ravenclaw team is historically… bad. “We’re just not a house that attracts loads of… athletes,” she says grimly, watching Ravenclaw’s keeper, Larry Urquhart, struggle to keep down his food, chewing like he’s trying to swallow cardboard. Rumour has it that last year Minerva McGonagall scored on him eight times over the course of a single hour-long match.

The Gryffindor table, in contrast, is practically celebratory, all of them gathered in one great mob around the reigning Gryffindor team. Minerva is smiling coolly as she adjusts her high, slick ponytail, and their captain, Donald Moxley, keeps glancing over towards the Ravenclaws and smirking. When Ravenclaw’s captain, Clive Ikeda, finally glances back at him, he drags his thumb across his throat in a universal ‘you’re dead’ gesture. Clive rolls his eyes while his girlfriend pats him comfortingly on the shoulder. “At least Slytherin’s cheering for us,” one of their beaters, Ralph Carstairs, shrugs. He is the older brother of Malcom’s friend Alec. “They always cheer for whoever Gryffindor’s playing against.”

“Think we could get them to hex Moxley?” one of the chasers, Olive Dalloway, mutters.

“I’d rather they hexed Applewhite,” a cold voice cuts in. Christine blanches besides Mae, who looks curiously in the direction of the speaker. It’s another one of Ravenclaw’s chasers, a tall third year. There is something off about her, and Mae isn’t referring to her terrible haircut; it looks like she took the scissors up herself and deliberately cut her feathery blonde hair as raggedly as possible around her shoulder, or the sour look on her otherwise pretty face. There’s just something strange, is all. Her eyes are blue, but flecked with some other color- goldish hazel, maybe. 

“No one asked you, Nezzie,” someone mutters.

“Why do you want to hex my brother?” Christine demands shrilly, and Mae realizes belatedly that they’re talking about Mick Applewhite. Mick is Christine’s older brother. He’s about as annoying as his younger sister, probably more because Mae isn’t friends with him in spite of it. He’s fourteen and insufferable, and Mae says that with full knowledge of how much energy it takes to be insufferable every day of your life. He’s got a habit of yanking Christine’s glasses off her face whenever he and his mates pass by them in the hall, and he puts a ridiculous amount of pomade in his hair. 

“Because he’s a good-for-nothing cheating bastard,” Nezzie enunciates precisely, clicking her tongue in disgust. “He fouls every game, and Tittensor lets it slide because he was a Gryffindor too.”

“Can it, Agneza,” Ralph snaps. “Maybe if you didn’t get into it with him every match-,”

“It’s my fault he’s a piece of work?”

“Pitch, now,” Clive barks, interrupting the argument. The Ravenclaw team departs, stalking past the jeering Gryffindor table and out the door.

“Was that the Veela?” Christine asks once they’re gone, as the rest of the students begin to get up from the long tables.

Mae blinks. “That’s a Veela? I thought they had wings and flowy hair and,” she makes a gesture to indicate height, “Aren’t they all giants?”

“She’s only a quarter,” Marian says, then- “Keep your voice down! It’s rude to speculate.” Marian is always very focused on everyone being polite and doing things by the book. She says it’s because her parents are artists who ‘let just about anything go’. Christine says that means they’re bohemians, but Mae is pretty sure bohemians would use more creative names for their children than ‘Marian’. Valerie thinks it’s a Persian thing, because that’s where Marian’s parents are from, only now Persia is called Iran, which Mae felt very smug about knowing because there was a Persian family living on Gibraltar who would come to the clinic sometimes. 

“She’s a quarter Veela?” Christine sniffs, adjusting her glasses. “I thought they were supposed to be beautiful.”

“Maybe it’s the haircut,” says Valerie, then- “Come on, Chris, you’re not really chuffed, are you? Mickey’s no angel.”

“He’s still my brother,” Christine says archly. “I’m allowed to be angry if some-,” she cuts herself off, shaking her head. “Let’s just go.”

The past week has been dry and sunny, but the rain’s returned with a vengeance today; it’s drizzling and blustery and Mae has forgotten her umbrella. She spots Mum walking down with a few of the other professors, heads bent towards each other against the wind. Mae debates trying to run up and wriggle under Mum’s umbrella, but the thought of everyone seeing her sucking up to her mother like that in public puts her off it. She does have some dignity. Instead she flips up the hood of her rain coat and leaps from puddle to puddle, balancing on the toes of her boots.

Mae thinks it’s pretty stupid that the stands are divided by house, but maybe it’s to stop brawls from breaking out. Malcolm puts his long legs to use and saves them seats towards the top, refusing to move even when Melvyn Squires gives him a dirty look for not giving up their spots. Mae sits on the aisle side, enjoying the literal sensation of looking down on the majority of her house. At least until the wind picks up again and she realizes just how high up they are. Then she focuses on the skies overhead, fighting with Malcolm over his binoculars until he hands them off to a triumphant Valerie. 

To her surprise, Hughie the prefect is the student announcer, fidgeting in his seat under the watchful gaze of Professor Dumbledore. The Gryffindor and Ravenclaw teams finally form some semblance of two neat lines and shake hands. Ikeda and Moxley look like they’re awfully close to cracking each other’s knuckles in more ways than one. Minerva carries herself a professional player, all stone-faced and limber as she straddles her broom, which looks old.

“Is she playing on a school broom?” Mae asks Malcolm, who shrugs.

“Dad’s not going to pay for a flying broomstick so she can play a made-up magic game, is he? She’s been saving up money, but the racing ones are expensive.”

Tittensor blows his whistle sharply, launches the red quaffle into the air, and they’re off. Mae almost immediately develops a crick in her neck from all the head-swiveling going on. She’s only ever seen glossy ‘photo replays’ of matches in sporting magazines, and watching one in person is completely different. The downpour of rain only increases in intensity as Ikeda and York, Gryffindor’s seeker, look frantically for a glint of gold, and the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw chasers battle it out, the ball constantly slipping and sliding from one grasp to another.

“And Gavran is pulling off yet another aerial stunt,” Hughie sounds like he’s enjoying himself, at least. “Tucking into a tight roll as she evades Applewhite yet again- no, McGonagall’s on her, she’s got it- no! Slipped from her fingers, right into Gavran’s lap-,”

Agneza Gavran and Minerva McGonagall are obviously both team powerhouses; rival chasers whose brooms seem to disappear once they’re up in the air, as if they had wings of their own. McGonagall is older and taller and clearly has a stronger throwing arm, but Agneza is fast, wickedly fast, and she dodges bludgers like nobody’s business, as if she were incorporeal, like a ghost. Mick Applewhite is constantly hounding her, but for all that he’s good at scoring goals, and does so on poor Larry Urquhart often, Agneza is always cutting him off in the air, swiping the ball away and either plunging low or diving upwards, out of his reach.

Gryffindor is clearly going to win by the time they reach the thirty minute mark; Ravenclaw’s team isn’t terrible, but they’re obviously not very coordinated as a group, and Ikeda can only do so much from his position in front of the goals. Forty minutes into it, Mick Applewhite clearly throws an elbow at Agneza after she scores on Moxley, but Tittensor ignores Ikeda’s shouts of ‘HE JUST FOULED HER- THAT WAS A FOUL!’ and gives them the go-ahead to keep playing. 

At fifty minutes, Walter York catches the snitch, and the Gryffindor stands explode in a riot of color and noise, waving sodden flags and banners and shooting off meager sparks which immediately dissipate in the torrential rain. Dumbledore looks vaguely pleased, even as Hughie sullenly rattles off the final score, and the teams land to shake hands again. Some people are already standing up to leave, eager to get out of the rain, but Mae is glad she hasn’t, because there’s some sort of argument breaking out down on the ground.

Agneza Gavran says something to Mick- “She definitely said ‘your father’,” Valerie breathlessly imparts after zooming in with Malcolm’s binoculars, and then-

No one needs binoculars to figure out what Mick Applewhite retorts, because Agneza jerks back in disgust, Clive Ikeda shoves at him, and Minerva turns on her own teammate, grabs him firmly by the shoulder, and punches him right in the mouth. 

“Halfbreed- he called her a halfbreed- hey, Mickey called her a halfbreed- good riddance!- well, it’s true- what, he’s going to get in trouble for that?- he’s a pig!- he’s right, she is- can’t believe they let- isn’t their father the- right, their dad’s Michael Applewhite- is that what she meant- look, he’s bleeding- is she gonna hit him again?”

The cloud of whispers, mutters, and shouts of rebuke or encouragement make their way up the stands like smog descending over a city. Everyone is looking at Christine. Mae is just confused, mostly. Not about ‘halfbreed’- she knows what that means, it’s like calling someone a ‘mudblood’ only in this case you’re not just insulting their blood, you’re saying they don’t even count as full human, that they’re part-creature, a monster, really, a freak. Maybe that’s why Mum doesn’t want her going around telling people she can talk to snakes. In case they think she’s part Gorgon or something. 

“What’s your dad got to do with anything?” she asks Christine, who is red as an apple, rain beading on the lenses of her glasses. She takes them off and scrubs at them furiously with a gloved hand. 

“None of your business!” Then she jumps up, shoves her glasses back on her face, grabs her umbrella, and slips and slides her way down the wet stands to the bottom, where she disappears into the crowd of students. 

“She is so dramatic,” Mae mutters, watching her baby blue coat vanish from sight. “Always stomping off like that.”

“Her dad’s a hit wizard,” Marian says as the rest of them stand up. “You know. A really famous one.”

“He works for the mob?”

Malcolm guffaws at that. Valerie looks as though she’s not sure if they’re pulling her leg or not.

“No,” says Marian. “Sort of like an auror, but they send them abroad to capture people who are on the run. Or just around Britain. They’re supposed to be plainclothes- you know, so they blend in. They don’t have to go around telling people they work for the Ministry or wear a uniform. Like a…,” she searches for the word, “a bounty hunter. Michael Applewhite. He had that big case a few years ago, where they said he killed somebody without authorization. My mum took pictures for it.”

“Pictures of the dead body?” Mae asks eagerly.

“No, of him in court,” Marian snaps. “Don’t be crude.”

“I didn’t know they could authorize wizards to kill people,” Valerie sounds slightly taken aback.

“The Americans execute people all the time,” Marian says primly. “Anyways, most everyone knows that’s her and Mick’s dad. That’s why Mick’s a junior- he’s Michael Applewhite II.”

Malcolm snorts. “Their dad sounds like a bellend.”

Mae shrugs. “I think it sounds neat. He’s like a spy. Like James Bond.” She mimes drawing a pistol, which only Valerie gets, giggling. 

“If he was a good spy, nobody would know who he was,” Malcolm points out.

Mae splashes a dirty puddle at him in retaliation.

The Ravenclaw common room is in a fairly good mood for the rest of the weekend; they may have lost the match, but Gryffindor lost itself thirty points in the span of two minutes. That evening at dinner Mae notices that absolutely no one will sit beside Minerva; most of the Gryffindors seem to be snubbing her for going against her teammate. If she’s bothered, she does a good job of hiding it, reading her book and sipping her pumpkin juice without looking up throughout the meal. 

Hallowe’en is the following week, but there’s a rather lackluster reaction to it; it’s on a Thursday, everyone will have classes and homework, just as usual, and there isn’t going to be any grand Samhain celebration beyond a special feast for dinner. Mae is highly disappointed, after growing up hearing all about the bonfires and the masks and the dancing. What’s the point of going to a magic school if they’re not doing anything special for a magical holiday? 

Mum and her would carve up pumpkins and go the cemetery to visit Mister Sabath’s grave, mostly so they could tell him how the clinic was doing and leave him some food and flowers. Sometimes Mum would let her paint her face like a skull, too, but she got sick of that after Mae kept hiding in closets to jump out at her, growling. And once or twice they went to see Don Juan Tenorio performed on All Saints Day. Mae mostly liked the part where the tomb cracks open and they try to drag Don Juan to Hell. It was a bit annoying to see him get saved by his dead girlfriend every time. 

Her dad wasn’t buried on Gibraltar, so they could never visit his grave. She doesn’t really care. A grave doesn’t mean anything, it’s just some old jumbled bones under the ground. Mum says if she ever drops dead one day she wants to be cremated and have her ashes sprinkled in some garden somewhere. Mae keeps threatening to keep them in a specimen jar instead so Mum can watch from the afterlife, probably wishing she’d hung around as a ghost so she could yell at her. Muggles can’t become ghosts, but wizards and witches can. Something about the shade of their magic lingering on the earth. Mae would rather be a poltergeist when she dies, but apparently there’s a whole demonic ritual you have to do for that. 

As a ‘Hallowe’en treat’ Professor Carmody teaches them how fend off an angry ghost, with Nearly Headless Nick serving as the example. Unfortunately, he keeps forgetting he’s supposed to be pretending to want their eternal souls, and keeps encouraging them and waving his sword around instead. It scythes through John Amory’s neck with one point, and he faints dead away while everyone laughs uproariously. Mae spends most of her time making patterns on the floorboards with the crushed salt and sage they’re supposed to be using, and Malcolm accidentally sets his tie on fire with a candle. Carmody seems relieved to dismiss them by the end of class, retreating to her desk as if she’s just watched a battle scene, Nick still yammering away to her. 

She’s surprised when Mum passes her a note at the end of Potions, their last class of the day on Thursday. The one good thing besides the feast has been Astronomy being canceled tonight because of it. Not that Mae really minds the class; Professor Finch is very easygoing and doesn’t care if they talk, so long as they don’t talk too loudly, but she doesn’t like having to stay in her uniform for hours all day just so she can trudge up to the Astronomy Tower to peer through a telescope. She already knows most of what they’re going over anyways. 

The feast that night has enormous pumpkins and skeletons with clacking jaws and an entire colony of bats nesting in the rafters. There’s pumpkin stew still swimming in the rind and there’s more pastries and sweets than Mae has possibly ever seen before, but to everyone’s surprise she eats quickly and excuses herself less than an hour into the feast. “You’re not staying for the singing?” Valerie asks around her mouthful of cookie. Malcolm is busy cracking his jaw on a candied apple. 

Mae swipes one for the road and shrugs. “I’m tired, and we’ve got Defence tomorrow morning. I don’t want to be late again.”

“That’s a first,” Christine says, but she and Marian wave goodbye as Mae ducks out of the hall, narrowly dodging a shower of what she hopes is just fruit punch from a shrieking Peeves.

She goes up to the dorm and puts on her heaviest wool jumper, then trudges up to the now empty Astronomy Tower, albeit with more of a spring in her step than usual. When she reaches the top, she pushes open the unlocked door and crosses through the darkened classroom to the figure staring out through the floor-to-ceiling windows, one of which is pushed open far enough to let a person slip through. Mae snakes her arms around her mother’s waist and rests her head on her shoulder. She’s not that short; soon she’ll be as tall as Mum. Next year, maybe. 

“Ready?” Mum says, and it’s odd to hear her like this, light and carefree after weeks of only hearing her use her ‘professor’ voice and not her ‘mum’ one. Mae never gets to spend any time alone with her except on the weekends, and even then Mum is always worrying over her latest lesson plans or grading papers. It’s not that she had all this free time when she was a full-time healer, but at least they were together. Mae will never admit it aloud, but she is a little lonely without her, sometimes. Yes, she sort of has friends, but that’s not the same. She’s only known them for two months. She’s known Mum her entire life. Forever. 

“Ready,” she says, and latches onto her mother’s back as she straddles an old school broom and kicks off from the window. For a terrifying moment they just drop, and Mae bites down hard onto the candied apple to keep herself from screaming, then almost chokes on it as they rise, buoyant, once more, coasting along the wind and racing up, up, up- until the castle is laid out beneath them like a model or a child’s toy, and Mae knows she shouldn’t look down, but the darkness is helping with her fear of heights, and all the glittering lights in the windows are winking merrily back up at her. 

They race along the lines of the rampart, past snarling gargoyles, around the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw and Divination towers, and then break free of the confines of the castle, out across the sprawling hills and they swerve over Hogsmeade’s flickering gas lamps and then they are above the lake, and Mum lowers them until Mae can feel the spray of the water across her blue jeans. They skim along the surface as if they were ice skating, although Mae has never been ice skating, and cut dark shadows across the bloated, grotesquely white reflection of the moon on the black water. At one point, Mae lets go of Mum, and watches in open awe as she stands up, even if only for a few moments, on the broom, arms out to hold her balance. The wind rips her scarf out of her hair and it streams freely behind her. 

Mae doesn’t know how to describe the expression on Mum’s face. It is not a motherly expression or a professional expression, there is no agenda or concern or worry writ behind it, it just is… what it is. It is someone experiencing sheer joy and freedom for a few perilous seconds. She looks as though she could float away, up into the silvery clouds, and disappear forever. Mae feels a stab of fear in her chest, and resists the urge to throw her arms around her mother’s legs like a toddler. No. She is not going anywhere. Then Mum slowly sinks back down to a crouch atop the broom, grips it with one fist, and guides it slowly back up into the hills.

They lie there on a quilt Mum shrunk and put in her pocket, and watch the distant, solitary glow of one bonfire streaming flames into the night, far off in the distance. Mae tosses the core of her apple up into the air, and Mum hits it with a blast of magic that shatters it into a thousand minuscule pieces, carried away on the wind. “Nice,” she says, rolling over so the back of her head is resting on Mum’s chest. 

“Am I mother of the year now?” Mum asks. “Do you forgive me for dragging you here and making you wear a uniform?” Her tone is lighthearted but there is a genuine glimpse of fear behind the words. Mae varies between savoring that power, as any child might, the power to make an adult who cares about them afraid and uncertain, and hating it. She doesn’t want Mum to be afraid, she just wants Mum to get off her back sometimes. 

“You didn’t drag me anywhere. ‘Sides, the uniform’s not so awful,” then she wrinkles her nose at the lie. “Well, not really. It is pretty awful. But it’s not your fault. I’d have to wear a uniform at any school.”

“I’m afraid so,” Mum kisses her flushed scalp. “You’re not going to be sick, are you? Did I go too fast?”

“Nah,” Mae shrugs. “I think I’m developing an immunity.”

Her mother laughs throatily. “Is that so?”

“Yeah. It’s called ‘I don’t want to upchuck in front of my Flying class’.”

Mum rubs her shoulder. “What about your other classes? Do you like them?”

Mae is silent for a moment, thinking. “I like Defence,” she says. “Even if I don’t always like Carmody. I like Transfiguration. Dumbledore’s interesting.”

“That he is,” Mum allows. “What about Herbology?”

“It’s… fine.” Mae does not have much of a green thumb, but she doesn’t want to break her mother’s heart, either. “I like being outside.”

“Finch says you’re doing very well in Astronomy.”

“I thought his name was Sidney to you,” Mae snorts. He does look like a Finch; there’s something small and avian and bird-like about him. 

“Yes, to me, but not to you!” 

“Yeah, yeah…” Mae yawns, loudly. “How about you? D’you like teaching Potions?”

“What mark would you give me out of 20?” Mum challenges.

Mae thinks. “Erm… 15. Pretty decent, for your first time. But you know, not perfect.”

“You’re a very forgiving scorer,” Mum chuckles, then squeezes her. “I just- I just hope you like it here. I did. This was the first place I ever… it just felt like home. And I know it won’t be the exact same way for you, but I do… I want you to be happy. So if you’re not happy, you gotta tell me, kiddo, so we can work it out.”

Mae drums her fingers across her ribcage. “It’s… I don’t know. I like some things. I like the classes. Mostly. And I like getting to go explore. And I like the food,” she pats her stomach, and Mum sighs good-naturedly. “I like watching quidditch matches… and living in a tower, even when it’s windy, and I like the library… I hate sharing a room. And I hate having to get dressed up for nothing. And I hate getting scolded. I hate some of my housemates. And I hate being the youngest.”

“It will be better next year,” Mum consoles her. “You’ll be used to everything, and you won’t be the lowest year anymore.”

“I su-ppose,” Mae draws it out into a lengthy drawl. “I can’t wait to be an upperclassmen. Scaring ickle firsties,” she tickles at Mum’s neck, to no avail. She’s like a rock. 

“I miss eating with you,” Mum says. “And I miss being able to say goodnight and good morning to you. I miss the clinic and the quiet time. And I miss the warm weather and Teddy and Patsy and the beach.”

“I miss Fernanda,” Mae says, then turns so her face is muffled by the quilt. “But I’ll find a new snake in the spring.”

“A little one,” Mum urges, then sighs. “I see you with the McGonagall boy a lot. And your roommates, right? Faraday and Applewhite and Darvesh?” 

“Christine’s dad’s a hit wizard, did you know that?” Mae informs her, rolling back over to face Mum.

Mum smiles dryly. “I heard some rumors. Do you wish I was a hit witch? Sounds like an exciting job.”

“Nah,” says Mae. “Your job is plenty exciting right now. Remember when Alec blew up his cauldron?”

Mum winces. “Yes.” Then she squints up at the stars in the night sky above them. “Bet you have a great view from your common room. What’s that like? I’ve only ever been in two-,” she stops herself at the last moment, but Mae latches onto it in delight.

“Two? Hufflepuff and which one?” she demands. “How’d you get in? Did someone sneak you in? Did you break in?”

Mum flushes for a moment, then collects herself and says, “Hufflepuff and Gryffindor. Teddy let me and Patsy see the inside once.”

Mae does not believe that for an instant, but isn’t sure if she’s lying about it being with the O’Neills, or the common room in general. “What’d it look like?”

“Very red.” Mum says. “Lots of… lion statues.”

“Uh huh.” Mae files that for a later date. She’ll catch her out in a big lie yet, and then there’ll really be hell to pay, she thinks fondly. But she tells Mum about the Ravenclaw common room, and the people, and their various pets, and what they like to talk about- “Politics, mostly, right now.”

Mum stiffens. She hates politics. Mae doesn’t know if that’s a ‘jaded war thing’ or just a ‘Mum thing’. “Your friends? I didn’t think they’d be interested in that sort of nonsense.”

“Not my friends,” Mae snorts. “Well, except Marian. She says her parents are abstaining from the vote ‘cause they think they’re both corrupt. Tuft ‘cause she never got much done and Gaunt ‘cause all the old families are trying to buy his seat.”

Mum is silent for a very long moment. “What do you think?”

“I dunno anything about it,” Mae shrugs. “Should I?”

“No,” Mum says. “You shouldn’t. It’s all rubbish anyways. The Ministry’s a big clanky machine and there’s too many moving parts to even begin to fix everything that’s wrong with it. Don’t worry about that kind of thing until you’re older. Like boys,” she pokes Mae in the arm. “You just be you. The spectacular Mae-flower.”

“Ugh,” says Mae. “You’re getting all sentimental on me, old woman.” She pauses. “You’re going to vote though, right? Aren’t they doing it in a special kind of fire, like Floo powder?”

“Yes,” Mum says it reluctantly, as it’s almost being stretched out of her like taffy. “They send us a powder that turns the fire blue, and then we write our vote on a special piece of paper and toss it in. Then they get it on the other side and count them all up.”

“Everyone all at once?”

“Yep. They’re very strict about it.”

“So who’re you voting for, then?” Mae asks curiously. “Gaunt, right? Marian says all the young people like him over Tuft.”

Mum’s jaw tightens up, before she allows, “I thought I was an old woman now.”

“I was just kidding you. So Tuft, then?” Mae hums under her breath, trying to conjure up images of the two in her head from the newspaper. She knows Tuft is an old woman in her sixties with her hair in a curly grey bob and a square ish sort of no-nonsense face. Gaunt is a much younger dark-haired man who looks like he could be in films, with a charming smile. Valerie has the biggest crush on him; she blushes whenever she sees his moving picture in the Daily Prophet. Mae skimmed an article about him, once, but didn’t find it very interesting aside from the fact that he was only thirty, like Mum. 

“Did you ever know him in school, Gaunt?”

Mum sits up suddenly, and Mae wrinkles her brow at her. “What?”

“Nothing, just got a crick in my back,” Mum says, massaging it with a hand. She shakes her head. “No, I knew of him, but our… our circles didn’t mix much.” Something about the way she says it is weird. She never usually sounds like that when she talks about school. 

Mae sits up herself, stretching. She’s got a bit of grass in her hair. “Imagine if you did, and he won? That’d be so cool. You’d be friends with a real famous person.”

“Most famous people aren’t very nice,” Mum says in her lecture-y Mum-way. Don’t be silly, Mae. “It’s not like how it is in the films you watch, Mae. You don’t get to that sort of level by being good to other people.”

“If I was famous I’d still be good to other people,” Mae mutters. “Well, the people I liked, anyways!” 

Mum is standing up. 

“Can’t we stay out a little while longer?” Mae wheedles.

But she shakes her head, squinting at her watch in the moonlight. “Christ, it’s almost ten. You have class in the morning, baby. You need to get to bed.”

Mae huffs, but reluctantly stands up as well. Mum folds up the quilt and shrinks it, then clambers onto the broom, helping Mae get behind her. “Hold on, alright?”

Mae nods tiredly against her loose hair, then shuts her eyes against the wind as Mum kicks off from the ground, propelling them back into the cold night air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. The next chapter will be from Tom's POV, which I'm a little scared of. But, should be fun! Scary, but fun!
> 
> 2\. Mae is that kid who would get into prolonged debates with the teacher long after the rest of the class had mentally checked out, or were daydreaming of strangling her. What I'm trying to say is, yes, she is a sweet kid (most of the time) but she can also be incredibly obnoxious and annoying, like most eleven year olds.
> 
> 3\. Mae's inherited, as is very clear by now, Tom's general distaste for brooms and flying (although she is much more intrigued by quidditch matches than he ever was).
> 
> 4\. The Gryffindors are kind of assholes through the Ravenclaws' perspective! (At least, this specific batch of them). I can see a lot of Ravenclaws getting along well with Slytherins, and a lot of Ravenclaws getting along with Hufflepuffs, but I feel like the Ravenclaw-Gryffindor relationships might be a little... tense at times.
> 
> 5\. Agneza 'Nezzie' Gavran, who is a quarter veela and the daughter of a Croatian (called Yugoslavia at this time) half veela and the pureblood wizard Atticus Greengrass, was referenced once or twice in BW as part of Tom's blackmailing scheme. She was just an infant then; she is now a third year Ravenclaw with a talent for chasing. The father of Christine and Michael 'Mick' Applewhite II, Michael Applewhite I, appeared briefly in BW as well during an intense duel against a young June Carmody. He has gone on to become a notorious hit wizard with at least one controversial court case under his belt. 
> 
> 6\. Minerva has an ironclad sense of justice that does not always make her the most popular person in the room. We'll be seeing a lot more of it in this fic.
> 
> 7\. The times, they are a-changing. The wizarding world is moving slowly but surely away from the more over the top celebrations of holidays like Samhain and towards a more 'mainstream' or 'secular' view of things. It's not nearly the big thing it was when Amy was a student, in part because of changing demographics, in part because there's just so many more students it's not that practical.
> 
> 8\. I wanted Amy and Mae to have a chance for a good long chat in private before The Shit Hits The Fan. Amy has both Mae's wellbeing and happiness at school to worry about and the upcoming election, and Mae is mostly struggling to adjust to the whole concept of being in an academic institution and having all these rules and formalities to abide by. 
> 
> 9\. Amy still loves to fly, which I wanted to include just because I think it's cool imagery, especially of her skimming the lake or standing on her broom. It's become a real expression of personal freedom and happiness for her, even all these years later (as well as one of the few things Tom could never even begin to compete with her in). 
> 
> 10\. Amy has 100% been in the Slytherin common room before. I know it never came up in BW, but she totally has been. (Tom, however, has never been in the Hufflepuff common room. Not that he'd ever want to, I think.). 
> 
> 11\. Amy hates lying to Mae and also isn't very good at it. She's got a much easier time fibbing to her fellow adults than her own daughter, who also is pretty observant for a kid. 
> 
> 12\. Mae is coming of age in an era where 'fame' and 'celebrity' is really beginning to take on new meaning, especially when it comes to political figures. 
> 
> 13\. Again, the next chapter will be Tom's very first POV, which I'm a bit nervous about. We'll be seeing some other familiar faces as well, and spending quite a bit of time at the Ministry. It will cover the much-anticipated Election Day.
> 
> 14\. Addendum: I've recently made a tumblr, you can find me there at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com). I will mostly be posting chapter updates or new story updates. You can ask me questions or propose prompts to me over there if you like. I may occasionally float around new story ideas when I'm bored.


	10. Tom I

LONDON, NOVEMBER 1957

He wakes at half past three in the morning in a cold sweat, the sheets bunched around his legs. The dream is already slipping out of his hands like sand between his fingers, and though he eases his head back down onto the warm pillow in an attempt to forestall it, it’s already gone. There is a brief pang of disappointment, then the silence of the bedroom. When he was a child all his dreams would linger, and what was more, he could make them come true- if he dreamed he could make fire with his hands, he could and he would, if he dreamed he could talk to snakes, well, he’d already been doing that for years and years. 

If he dreamed of a marble melting into his hand, and a pair of watery blue eyes crinkled in fascinated delight- it was because she was just across the hall. Nothing he dreamed was immaterial or outside of his abilities. Nothing he wanted was impossible to achieve. Nothing he was frightened of, no childish nightmare, could lay a finger on him, because he was impenetrable. He’d picture other people’s- other children’s- minds as a mesh sieve full of holes. Occasionally useful but fundamentally flawed- on purpose. His mind was different. Thoughts didn’t lazily splash through him. They settled. They stuck. And they were put to work. 

If he ever dreamed of her back then, he took it for a reassuring sign of his talents. He could make things float. He could make snakes speak. He could make fire roar and the ground tremble and the air crackle and water surge. He could make people leave him be, and he could make them stay. He could always make them stay. He doesn’t put much stock in fortune or fate. It’s an excuse for weakness, a lack of discipline. Men rail at gods and stars for their own failings. And if he’s ever had a fate, it’s one he cut himself, neatly tailored to his unflinching expectations of success. There’s too much to be gained from holding oneself to high stands, and too little to leaving things up to chance.

But he’s not a child anymore, and the dreams don’t comfortingly linger the way they once did. They leave abruptly, and they leave him uneasy. Tom despises lukewarm uneasiness or uncertainty, would much rather cold sureties. Outside his window, London is dark and shuttered aside from the distant gleam of headlights. He sits up in bed, runs a hand through his hair, and notes that it’s shaking slightly, to his disgust. He grinds his fingers into the springs of the mattress, coiled tightly under the sheets, then gets up. The townhouse is a very recent acquisition; contrary to what the papers might occasionally sneer about, he is not ‘rolling in new money’; far from it. 

Long-term assets are completely different from the sort of fast money that can be used to quickly purchase all the trappings of imitating success. He doesn’t fling Galleons about, but his savings are much more modest than most would speculate. The pay raise from being named office head was helpful, but not by much. The Ministry’s finances are a wreck, although still a good sight better than most of the bankrupt European magical governments. He’s going to have to hire two dozen accountants to figure out exactly how far in debt they are to the goblins and the Americans, and then another two dozen to fix the books the way he wants. It always costs more to make money disappear and reappear. 

The townhouse is a Victorian remnant shuffled from one magical family to another; the ‘perfect starter home’ the real estate witch enthused, although she looked a little askance at the idea of a bachelor needing three bedrooms and two baths until he explained he was newly engaged. That was over six months ago, and since then it’s been in an endless cycle of repairs and renovations, workers trudging in and out, and Lydia popping in every other week with some new idea for the wallpaper, rugs, artwork, or lamps. Tom doesn’t particularly mind; he has relatively little interest in the interior so as it’s not a cluttered, squalid mess. 

Sometimes, just before he wakes, he smells and feels Wool’s in the air around him; the stench of half a hundred often unwashed bodies and dirty clothes and spills and stains on the floor and the slate grey walls. The dust and the grime and the wet laundry, dripping, always dripping, across the floorboards. The rusting faucets and doorknobs and the stairs that creaked and groaned as if in agony and the flimsy windowpanes rattling in the wind. He used to bolt up in a panic when he was a first year at Hogwarts, convinced he’d just woken from some extraordinary dream or vision, and would find himself right back where he’d begun.

He doesn’t have those petty fears anymore, but he does take a certain amount of vague pride in the house. Nothing is disheveled or unordered. Nothing is out of date or tarnished. And nothing is cheap or tawdry. He reaches over and turns on the bedside lamp, watches the dim yellow light creep across the room. Then he moves towards the wardrobe with practiced silent steps, some small boyish part of him still bracing to be caught out of bed by a grownup, always cautious, always holding his breath. The pensieve was one of the first things he saved up for, the first physical object he can really recall wanting, after-

Well, after. 

Borgin & Burke’s purchased it on the sly from one of the many aurors selling confiscated magical items long after their court dates, and Tom was able to argue his way into a bargain for it eventually. It set him back a little in money, but not for long. He’s always been good at recouping his losses quickly, and he was working as a bookie by then as well- three jobs at once. The Office of Improper Use of Magic during the weekdays, the antiques shop during the week evenings, and bookmaking every Saturday and Sunday. He came into work with dark circles under his eyes, but so were every other young professional’s. It was praised, expected. Here was someone who knew how to prioritize. Here was someone devoted to maximizing profits. And he seldom took holidays or sick leave, either. 

He quit Borgin & Burke’s when he was twenty three, bookmaking when he was twenty six, but sometimes he almost misses it. Not the stress of the workload, but the frenetic sensation of chugging away towards the finish line. It was nice, not having to think, just work. He could lose himself in his reports or the numbers or the artefact he was helping Borgin to restore, and the time seemed to melt away. Days flew by into weeks and months, and suddenly he was nineteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty two- and it would be ages since he’d thought of her, or any of it, anything beyond the present, and he’d get a little giddy thrill down his spine, triumphant. Then he bought the pensieve and backslid, of course. How could he not? He knew it would be a temporary problem, but a long term solution. Plenty of things are. They might make his life more difficult for a few hours or days or weeks, but ultimately- ultimately he has no regrets. 

He sets it carefully on the newly polished floor and crouches down beside it; the basin resembles a miniature baptismal font more than anything else. The runes activate as soon as his hands pass over them, and the pensieve instantly floods with silvery, swirling liquid almost of an oily consistency, before it morphs into a gas, small clouds scurrying across the surface of the basin. Tom puts his wand to his temple, utterly relaxed. He’s spent years organizing his mind into neat compartments, and although he was slightly apprehensive the first time, he’s never had a serious mishap. The memory slides out and onto the tip of his wand with no more sensation than that of a loose hair being plucked from his scalp.

It twitches on the tip of the yew wood as he lowers it into the basin, then sinks into the gas, spreading out with a strange ripple effect, branches and roots shooting off it like some sort of tiny shrub. All memories mutate, given time. There is no such thing as a perfect, in-the-moment, recollection. A small detail of the memory changes ever so slightly with each viewing, like exposing a priceless old work of art to the sun and air. He doesn’t mind. It’s been over a decade now, and he’s detected no massive changes to its essential structure. 

Tom sets his wand down on the floor, grips the sides of the basin with both hands, and leans over, inhaling the fumes until his face nose brushes the bottom. Then he lets go, and sinks.

It feels almost like diving into a swimming pool or still pond, but not quite. There’s no sense of being soaked to the skin, or of plummeting through the air, just a slow, gradual descent. Colors and sounds are muted, but only slightly. Not enough to be distracting or disturbing. He lands solidly on his feet with no sound or even feeling of hitting the floor; the weightlessness of it all makes many people sick, or faint, but Tom enjoys the temporary lack of control, if only because it is to his exact design. It is his memory, after all, and after so many repeated visits, he knows every inch of it, every possible facet one could explore.

_It is the first night of a four day stopover in Diagon Alley. It is 1943 and they have nowhere else to go before school starts up again. He watches his younger self sit at the cramped little desk in the rented room, writing furiously as he flips through his school notes, and observes, as he has a hundred times before, the peeling sunburn on the back of his neck, a leftover reminder of the recent months in the countryside, and the way his shirtsleeves are too short for his long arms, well above his wrists. His hair is recovering from a crude military-esque buzzcut, only just starting to brush at his pale ears again, and his eyes are shadowed and drawn in concentration._

Tom peers over his own shoulder to examine what he is looking at. _Ancient Runes summer busywork. His fingers are smeared with dried ink and his pen is skittering across the parchment in a soothing rasping loop, gliding along with his handwriting. He clenches his jaw as he finishes copying one set, then flips over to the next, pausing for a moment to work out a tight crick in his right hand, setting his pen down and opening and closing his long fingers._

There’s a tentative knock at the door. Tom watches himself pause, rigid with suspicion, then stand up, chair scraping across the floor. _He strides over to the door, almost tripping over his discarded shoes besides the four-postered bed, and then opens it to reveal her._ Tom retreats to a corner of the room to watch as she enters. In this memory they are sixteen and look more and more youthful every time he enters into it. 

There is no perverse satisfaction from watching two children stumble through their awkward greetings and half-questions, feeling one another out. This is just the last pure memory of it that he has. Of them. He haphazardly tore the rest out of his head himself, like an irate seamstress plucking out errant stitches.

Not well enough to really forget- of course he remembers how it ended, but enough to dull the pain, to make it feel fainter, softer, more of an ache and less of an agony. He watches his younger self resume his seat at the desk. _She follows, smiling faintly, and hops up onto it to sit beside his work, her legs dangling over the edge, a hand on his arm. She is wearing a faded dressing gown knotted around the waist, and a pair of clunky slippers hang precariously off her feet. Her hair is braided back in a thin, meager little plait._

It’s not what one would call an alluring picture, but he watches his sixteen year old self look at her as though she had come to him draped in silk and pearls. The unguarded wanting of it all. It bemuses him and repulses him and angers him. The blind affection and longing for this- this- but he can’t call it a deception, because it wasn’t, yet. _They are speaking barely above a whisper, and what they’re saying doesn’t matter- he’s heard it all before. They are closer together, now, and her hand moves from his arm to his shoulder, and his younger self leans back in his chair and pulls her closer, so she is bent over, kissing him, her braid hanging in between them like some chain._

Tom breezes through the rest of it, watches time speed around him. He’s not interested in the lurid details of the physical act, although he certainly was at the time. He’s not adverse to it now, either, although he will readily admit he has never been able to replicate what he had back then. That’s likely a common enough problem. Nothing is new or exciting or shameful anymore. There is no sense of desperate need or longing, because there is nothing and no one to deny him. He visits a very private establishment recommended by his idiot soon to be brother-in-law once every month or so. He avoids making a more frequent habit of it, and he avoids the busiest nights, where there might be an uncomfortable recognition of one face or another. 

Although sometimes, that can come in handy, knowing who’s been less than faithful. Particularly when they wed above their blood with a very nasty prenuptial agreement if charges of adultery were to be levied. 

If his favorite there has blue eyes and a freckled, almost plain sort of face, if there is a space between her front teeth and her smile is far from refined, if she is much older than the more popular girls, pushing thirty, well, one can hardly judge a man for what he likes in the dark. Her name is something as insipid and simple as her looks. Molly or Betty or Annie or something along those lines. The only thing he dislikes is her habit of chatting up a storm while he dresses. She likes to curl up in bed and play with one of the throw pillows in her lap while he buttons up his shirt, asking him inane questions about his work or his plans for the weekend, as if she were some coworker standing next to him in the lift. 

“I just can’t see why you even come here at all,” she told him once, hiding a wry sort of smile that was just familiar enough to make him want to put down his jacket, walk back over to her, wrap his hands around her fragile throat, and squeeze. It was the knowing of it that irritated him. No one has any business knowing anything about him. That’s why he gets along so well with Lydia or some of his colleagues at work. They don’t pretend to know him. “I’ve seen your girl in the paper. Cor, but she’s a beauty, isn’t she? I reckon she worships the ground you walk on, she does.”

“I shouldn’t have to explain to you why the looks of a man’s wife has very little to do with how he chooses to spend his money,” he’d replied coldly. “Surely it’s a business model you specialize in. Merlin knows no one is coming here for your astounding beauty.”

She’d blinked at him, then tossed the pillow lazily up into the air to catch it again. “No, sir.” Her tone had been one of thinly veiled reproach, as if he were a rude diner haranguing the waitress. But it never mattered how he ended their interactions. She always greeted him with a bright smile the next time around. He was capable of admitting that was part of the allure, and not just for him. Being with someone you didn’t have to extend any consideration for a past or future with. There was none, just a series of presents without consequence or bitterness.

The reality that he is thinking on a memory while projecting himself into another, separate, memory is not lost upon him. He comes back to himself in time to watch the aftermath. _In this memory, no one says ‘I love you’ or falls into effusive compliments. She is brutally pragmatic about the whole thing, extricating herself from him, getting up to use the bathroom, then coming back to bed, rebraiding her hair and sitting on the edge, her back to him, while he lies still, staring at the canopy. They are in a silent confrontation as to who will crack first._

_She does. “How was it?” she asks mildly, as they’d just come out of a cinema together, and were now going to casually discuss the picture. She turns back around to him, flipping her finished braid over her shoulder, and lies down on her side, facing him. “I thought we did pretty well for ourselves, for a couple of-,”_

_He leans over and kisses her, and she makes a muffled noise, but permits it, messing with his hair until he knocks her hand away. “That good, huh?” She is giggling now, flushed and breathless, and he rolls his eyes and glances around, scanning the room as if to check for witnesses. His younger self’s dark gaze cuts through him, but of course he was never there._

_“You seemed to enjoy yourself,” he watches himself say instead. “Judging by-,”_

_She slaps his bare shoulder, and now it is his turn to smile, sly and quick._

_“If you ever tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you,” she threatens with warm affection. “Cross my heart,” she slashes at her chest with a finger._

_“Oh, no,” he says drolly. “You’ve gone and upset my plans for the train ride back, now. A full report on my summer activities to the Slug Club.”_

_“You know me, I love to spoil a good Slytherin party,” she yawns, not bothering to cover her mouth._

_His sixteen year old self is baffled by this, wide awake and alert. “You can’t possibly be tired.”_

_“Can too,” she retorts. “You marched me all over Diagon today, hunting down that stupid book for Arithmancy- wasn’t even on the bloody required reading list-,”_

_“It was suggested material, God forbid I prefer to be **ahead** of the curve in that class-,”_

_“It was suggested material,” she mocks him, and he marvels to watch his younger self not only tolerate it, but encourage it. “Well, next time I suggest you look for it by yourself-,” ___

____

____

_“That’s really funny, because you’ve got a brilliant track record with being left on your own here-,”_

_“It was one time, Tom! **One time** I run into a spot of trouble, looking for you, I should add, and you harp on it for the next four years-,”_

_“Shut up,” he groans, closing his eyes momentarily. “Merlin and Morgana. You are insufferable sometimes.” But the edges of his lips are curling up in a dry smile._

_“Oh, Saint Tom,” she mutters, then scoots closer to him so she can rest her head on his shoulder, yawning again, louder this time. “You suffered me damn well a few minutes ago.”_

_“That was a momentary lapse in judgement.” He wraps his arm around her torso, keeps his hand possessively on the curve of her hip. The smile turns to a smirk. “Now that I’ve got it out of my system, it won’t happen again.”_

_“Liar,” she says fondly, sleepily, and kisses his neck. She is out like a light in short order. But he remains awake for the better part of the next hour, laying there with her curled around him like a cat, warm and heavy in her sleep, her scalp just below his chin. He shifts occasionally, but other than that, stays exactly as he is, his hand occasionally moving from her hip up the line of her spine and back down again._

The memory grows narrower and darker as it begins to fade, and Tom rises, moving closer to the bed, a hand on one of the carved wooden posts, watching them intently. She is still sleeping, a strange half-smile on her face in unconsciousness, and his sixteen year old self is utterly content to lay there underneath her, not moving, not thinking of much at all, his own eyelids fluttering as his steady breathing matches hers. 

He is still perplexed by it. How could he have just lain there? How could he have been so content with that? How could he waste time like that, and get nothing in return for it? He didn’t owe her anything. There was nothing in this lull for him, no reward or victory. He just… was. He existed in that moment with no motives or concerns, no agendas or goals beyond lying there and listening to her mumble in her sleep and feeling the warmth of her hands against his chest. All at once his younger self nods off to sleep as well, and the memory shutters like a window, and he rises all at once, buoyant, until with a start he is back in his present body, sitting on the floor in front of the pensieve. 

The basin drains, leaving the slightly withered wisp of memory beyond. He prods at it with his wand, lifts it back up, and replaces it in his head. He spent longer in it than usual; the sky is growing gradually lighter outside, and he’s supposed to clock in today at eight o’clock sharp. He could have taken a personal day, of course, given the date, but he had already resolved to work today, even before he got the memo yesterday afternoon about Isola being in custody. Now he’s almost eager to head into work. Overall, he enjoys what he does. But he especially enjoys it on days like today. 

He sleeps very well for the remaining few hours of night. A pensieve trip is usually enough to settle him for the rest of the month, if not even longer. He doesn’t consider it a dependency; it has no adverse physical or mental effects, and he could live without it. He just lives more comfortably with it. He sees it as a sign of his progression. If he can relive the same memory over and over again, with little anger or grief or any real emotional outburst at all beyond confusion or bemusement, then that means he is improving.

If he can limit recollections of her beyond the practical to just this occasional release, then he is doing something right. He’s not beating a dead horse, he’s only visiting its grave every so often. And with far less fuss and melodrama than most people. Tom is not most people. He has always taken such pride in this fact. Most people could not have accomplished what he has. Most people aren’t strong enough or smart enough. Most people are simply not determined enough. They don’t have or want the willpower to do what is necessary. They idle their lives away, drinking and fucking and flipping through magazines while on line at the greengrocer’s. 

They have children, frequently, and devote their lives to every squirming, squealing impulse of their progeny. They drift listlessly through their meager schooling and exert the bare minimum of effort in order to be deemed ‘sufficient’ by a board of aging bureaucrats who will then assign them to some mundane but necessary line of work, which they will perform, over and over again, every day, until they age out and collect welfare from their government and die in the same shabby little cement block of flats they were born in. 

Tom is not one of those people. 

On your average Monday morning, the Ministry headquarters is busy, alive with workers scurrying in and out of lifts, arms full of stacks or parchments or spellbooks, juggling cups of tea and coffee, calling out greetings to colleagues and visitors. Today is much the same, but there is an unusual tension in the air, and no one can quite meet anyone else’s eyes without a nervous laugh or queasy smile of ‘just get through this’. And whenever they see him, well, he all but revels in the quick nods of recognition or the occasional gaping look. Tuft is holed up in her office, no doubt, debating whether she should barricade the doors shut. 

Everyone knows who’s on the ropes here, and it’s certainly not his party. It’s been long enough. The ‘sensible majority’ has had its fun. Time to let someone else take a swing at it. He steps into the lift with his briefcase in hand, adjusting the slate blue robes over his grey flannel suit jacket. Two workers from the Department of Magical Equipment Control are already on their way up, and both shoot him dirty looks, but he ignores them, before a patrol wizard follows him in, smiling broadly at the sight of him.

“Big day, eh?”

“Yes,” says Tom. “Very. Thought it best to try to work through it, rather than sit home and wait.”

“There you go,” the wizard, an older man in his mid forties nods approvingly. “Best to tackle it head-on, yeah? Good on ya. Keep your head up, Gaunt. We’re rooting for you.”

Tom smiles faintly, as if he required the approval of some imbecile who never made it past beat cop.

As he expected, Norbook and one of the office secretaries are waiting for him. Arthur looks wary, hands in his pockets, but the secretary, some witch fresh out of Hogwarts, a lesser relation to one of the older families, is practically glowing to see him. “Good morning, Mister Gaunt!” she chirps, taking his hat and clicking backwards in her heels as they enter the office, past rows and rows of cubicles, some more well furnished than others. “You’ve that meeting with Admin Services at nine, but Mister Norbook’s just told me that the Aurors want you down the hall, so I thought we ought to-,”

“Push it back to nine thirty,” he says, but is careful to keep the impatience from his tone. Secretaries are, when push comes to shove, any department head’s last line of defence. It’s why the Minister has so many. It’s generally considered unwise to push them too far, given their habit of knowing more than they ought. This one was sufficient enough for an office head, but he doesn’t plan on taking her with them when he moves to Level One. He’d rather someone older, with a level head- and better penmanship. Her notes are atrocious when she’s in a rush.

She bobs her head, still blushing, and ducks into the back office to make a note of it, while Norbook takes him aside, lowering his voice. “You’re going to want the forewarning; Abbott was assigned to the case at six o’clock this morning. He’s been with Isola for the past two hours. I tried to forestall it, but Pike had other ideas. Obviously.”

Tom lets himself wish once again, and not for the last time, that he’d had Virgil Mulciber wring Matthew Abbott’s thick neck when they were schoolboys. He was too young then to realize it, but he’s come to understand that if you’re going to have someone else do a job, make sure they do it right. That beating hardly knocked any sense of cowering subservience into Abbott’s head. If anything, it gave him a chip on his stocky shoulder. Tom should have handled it himself.

“Not ideal, but I doubt Isola’s talked,” he says. “I have the records of his last two bookings by British authorities. He kept his mouth shut until the solicitor arrived.” Norbrook’s look makes him slightly irritated. “Don’t tell me the solicitor’s arrived.”

“Not yet,” Norbrook says. “But I wouldn’t waste any time getting over there. You know Abbott will try to stonewall you. You’ll want Room 6.”

The Auror Offices are at the end of the hall, directly across from the holding cells for anyone arrested the night prior. Most of them will have an initial hearing within the week, to determine whether they’re going straight to Azkaban, getting off with a heavy fine or wand restrictions, or being handed down a short-term sentence to be served out here instead of in the maximum security prison. By now he knows not to bother going to Abbott’s desk. He’s never there. The holding cells are a cacophony of shouting, shackles rattling, and doors slamming open and shut. 

Tom side-steps a burly auror and his partner wrestling a cursing wizard back into his cell, strides down the narrow hall, past the General Holding pen, where he’s paid someone to start a brawl in a few minutes, dodges a goblin being man-handled into an interrogation room. He enters Room Six through the door that leads to the space behind the one-way mirror. Abbott’s partner, Joan Harker, is watching through it, her chin resting on her fist. Tom presents her with a cup of tea and his most winning smile. “I think it’s my turn.” Harker doesn’t loathe him as Abbott does, but she’s not particularly fond of him, either. That’s alright. She’s been trying to get an Italian lover she met during the war with two past convictions through immigration for the past three years. Once that’s settled, she’ll be eating out of his hand.

“Good luck,” she says dismissively, before ringing the bell to alert Abbott that his time is up. 

Tom steps back out, meeting Matthew Abbott, all five foot nine of him, in the hall. 

“Gaunt,” Abbott says curtly. “You’re here because…”

“I’ll have Phyllis send you another memo,” Tom comments with a razor sharp smile. “As you seem to keep neglecting to read them. This clearly qualifies as Improper Use of Magic; he came over using an unregistered portkey he enchanted himself.”

“That seems like a job for the Portkey Office,” Abbott counters. “Which would be Level Six-,”

“I’m investigating the illicit enchantments on an unregistered object, not the use of the portkey itself,” Tom says through his teeth. “Now, if you don’t mind-,”

“Why are you even working today, Tom?” Abbott narrows his eyes at him. “Seems a little odd that today of all days-,”

“I like to make myself useful. I’m sure you can relate, Abbott.” Tom brushes past him, and pushes open the door to the room, letting it shut with a solid thud behind him. 

“They pulling in office stiffs to run questioning now?” If Jaime Isola is bothered by the fact that his hands are shackled to the metal table in front of him, or that he looks to be running on less than an hour of sleep, he doesn’t show it much beyond his red-rimmed eyes and greasy black hair. His clothing is atrocious, even if it wasn’t rumpled and stained. His Hawaiian shirt is untucked underneath his worn suede bomber jacket, and he is tapping one dragonskin oxford against the tiled floor, just frequently enough to grate on anyone’s nerves. His flat cap is worn at a jaunty angle, like it might fall off his head at any moment, and his bright green sunglasses are tucked into the frayed collar of his shirt. 

“Good morning, Mister Isola,” Tom says automatically, sliding into the seat across from him and setting down his sleek leather briefcase. “Can I get you something to drink? Water? Tea?”

“Brandy?” Isola suggests snidely. His voice is raspy and worn; he sounds much older than he looks, which can’t be a day over thirty five. At Tom’s cool stare, he shrugs. “Just thought I’d ask.”

“I have a few questions about your illicit charmwork,” Tom unlatches the case and slides out a tan manila folder, flipping through it with practiced ease as Isola watches him derisively. “It’s my understanding that this is the second time you’ve been apprehended with an unregistered portkey which you enchanted yourself. Your other offences include…” He exhales as he goes down the list. “Assault and battery. Assault on an officer. Resisting arrest. Extortion. Forgery. Petty theft. Breaking and entering. Disturbance of the peace. Disruption of the Statute. Unauthorized cursebreaking.”

He looks back up from his papers, arching an eyebrow at Isola, who stares back at him, unruffled. “You do understand that if this goes to trial you are very likely to be doing serious prison time, Mister Isola?”

“No comment,” Isola says smoothly. “I’d like to see my solicitor now.”

“He’s not here yet.” Distantly, Tom hears the faint sound of the next door opening and shutting, as the brawl back in General Holding escalates. Henry Rowle is finally making himself useful and getting Harker and Abbott out from behind the mirror to go help settle things down. Tom has about six minutes, give or take, before one or both of them return to continue monitoring the interview.

“Cooperating with the authorities is one way to improve your inevitable sentencing,” he continues, removing the photograph from under the files. “I’d just like you to answer a few questions for me, and I’ll see what I can do. My apologizes for not introducing myself sooner. Rookie mistake,” he smiles. “My name is Tom Gaunt. I am head of the Improper Use of Magic Office. I am also up for election tonight for British Minister for Magic.”

Isola blinks, and Tom watches the recognition settle across his suntanned face. “Huh,” he says. “No offence, amigo, but you are much better looking in pictures. Must be this lighting.”

As if one cue, the harsh artificial orb lighting the room flickers erratically, casting twitchy shadows across the table. Tom slides the picture over to him. “This witch is a person of interest in a pending case for the department. We know she’s been living and working in Gibraltar as a healer- sometimes under the table- for the past decade. Has she ever approached you about performing any charmwork or breaking any curses for her? Has she ever approached you about the sale of any magical items or ingredients?”

Isola picks up the photograph between two fingers, shackles clanking, and scans it; it was taken from a distance, and it is over a year old; the woman in it stands in front of a stall at a bazaar, holding onto her straw hat to keep the wind from blowing it away. She smiles and chats soundlessly with the proprietor as she buys a crate of dried ingredients from him, then tucks it under her arm and walks away.

He recognizes her; Tom can see that much from his face. He feels a brief flood of satisfaction. Isola won’t snitch on any serious ranked member of an organized crime family or group, but this is a win-win situation for him. There are no consequences to telling what he knows, and he has everything to gain. Even with the sleazy lawyer, he must know he’s going down for this. This is his third arrest this year. 

Jaime Isola sets the photograph back down, looks Tom directly in the eyes, and lies calmly, “Never met her in my life.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Tom fights to keep his tone even and mellow. “If you cooperate with us on this, I can negotiate your sentence down to fines. Do you understand what I’m saying? You could walk out of your cell tonight.”

“It’s just funny,” drawls Isola, still tapping his foot. “Because I was with your little friend Bishop-,”

“Abbott.”

“Yeah, I was with him all morning, and he never says a word to me about some witch selling me anything or taking anything to me to fix up or crack. But suddenly this guy from Improper Use of Magic shows up, all these questions... “ Isola trails off, regarding him carefully, and then smiles. “No comment.”

Tom scythes into his mind without warning then, and Isola blanches, all colour draining from his face, and cries out in shock as their minds briefly touch. Tom doesn’t have the time to do this carefully- he snakes down passageways and through rooms, tearing open drawers and boxes of memories and recollections, looking, looking- there she is- but the most prominent memory Jaime Isola has of her is not of any business deal between them or a hushed discussion in some dark alley, but of her cracking a joke while she mends his badly broken nose. The memory is flooded with faint affection and fond appreciation.

It’s revolting.

Tom wrenches back out of his head in disgust; the only thing keeping Isola in his seat are his shackled hands; his cap has fallen onto the floor and his pupils are fully dilated in terror. He composes himself quicker than Tom would have expected, though, sucking in a rattling breath even as he looks around wildly and cringes back. “You think you’re the first mind reader I’ve been around? The Cavillas keep three on their fuckin’ payroll, you smarmy-,”

He doesn’t have time for this. “ _Imperio_ ,” Tom says under his breath, and Isola’s face goes slack and smooth. “You’re going to tell me all about your last conversation with her, and if she showed you a ring. Now.”

But he’s fighting it; he might be a two-bit conman and an upjumped thug, but he has an impressive force of will, all the same. Tom can feel him straining against the curse, even as he hears distant footsteps hurrying back in the hall outside. Isola’s jaw is twitching furiously, as if he’s about to bite off his own tongue, and all that comes out is a stream of incoherent stammers and stutters, just before he slams his own hand down hard on the table in an effort to break free of the curse. Sudden pain or shock is sometimes known to do that. Tom’s very familiar with the clumsy strategy.

The next door is opening and shutting. The clock’s run out on him. Again. “ _Obliviate_ ,” he casts quickly, writing over the past few minutes of memory to a muddled mess, but it’s better than nothing. The door opens as he rises and Isola reels back in his seat, sweating profusely and looking around, mumbling to himself incoherently. He’ll recover within the hour, but he’s not going to remember enough to be an immediate problem. 

“Isola, your solicitor’s here-,” Abbott stops in his tracks, Harker just behind him, and looks from Isola to Tom. “Has he been sick?”

“Completely out of it for the past few minutes,” Tom says with brisk disdain, snapping his briefcase shut. “I’d wager he’s coming down off something.”

Harker sighs audibly. “Someone get him some water-,”

“He was fine ten minutes ago- completely coherent, alert-,”

“Ten minutes ago he wasn’t doing much but smirking and fidgeting, was he?” Tom retorts drolly. “Well, this has been a spectacular waste of my office’s time,” he checks his watch. “And I have a meeting with Admin Services to prepare for.”

The rest of the day goes smoothly enough, but his fury is hard to shake. He tells himself he’s overreacting. None of this will be an issue tomorrow. Isola will be much more manageable when he’s dealing with the Minister himself. As will Abbott. Tom’s rather looking forward to some of these new reforms. It’s a pity he didn’t get anything out of him today, and he did enjoy the challenge, but there’s always tomorrow. He’s been telling himself that for years, whenever things look bleaker than usual. There is always tomorrow. 

The office holds a small party for him before they all clock out at five, and he spends a few precious minutes making small talk and picking at a slice of coffee cake that Phyllis made herself, before he begs off to head home. Everyone is very understanding, naturally. “Fingers crossed,” Norbrook says, nodding at him in approval. “June and I will be tuning in tonight.”

Tom wants to tell him that he doesn’t need luck and never has, but he just shrugs out of his robes and into his overcoat instead, picking up his hat. “Give her my best.”

The voting begins at seven o’clock sharp. Lydia brings her parents round, and a few others show their faces, all wary excitement and intense looks. Tony Nott and his wife, Lydia’s beloved eldest aunt, and her other aunts, one married to a Bulstrode, the other to a Black. They make something of a cocktail party out of it, but it is still a weekday, after all, and most have left by the time nine o’clock rolls around. It usually takes several hours to count all the votes; they should hear over the wireless by midnight, if not by owl before. Lydia’s parents depart as well once the clock strikes ten, after a brief debate over whether she should go home with them. She insists Lyle will bring her home himself, and her brother reluctantly agrees.

The fire has died down a good deal in the hearth, and it is just Tom and the Rosier siblings. Lyle is a little drunk, unsurprisingly, but still cognizant enough to keep up his prattle about various appointments and promotions. He’s convinced himself he is all set up to be the right hand man to the new Minister, that it’s his due after convincing his father to agree to the marriage. Tom’s bored of placating him, but he won’t have to much longer. Lydia is radiant in the warm light of the fire and the dull orange glow of the art deco lamps she picked out herself last month. 

Tom enjoys watching her sometimes, the way he might enjoy lingering in front of a painting in a museum for a little while, drinking in its aesthetic appeal and bright colours, before moving along. She’s very amenable; never a cross word or sharp look from her. He suspects most of it is in act, but that’s fine. Better an actress than a martyr. If she thinks she’ll just bide her time until the wedding, well, that makes two of them. In a sense, she’s very lucky. She’d be wasted on most men; they’d shut her up in some parlor with a sewing circle or book club.

He even indulges himself and lets her get him a refill on his scotch. She jumps up happily enough, fixes his drink, and then returns to her seat by the fire, curled up in an armchair like a child on Christmas Eve, eagerly awaiting someone’s arrival. The fact that she’s kicked off her heels and tucked her legs up under her skirt speaks to her mood in the absence of her parents. Her chignon bun is slightly crooked, and she is nursing her Irish coffee as though it were a mug of warm milk. 

“I think it’d be good for you to spend more time around the Malfoys in the coming weeks,” he says, as Lyle begins to nod off in his sleep, his hair falling into his face like a little boy. “Their charity’s garnering a lot of press, and Adeline knows how to play the newspapers properly. And you should visit your aunt Druella more often. We’ll want Cygnus firmly in our corner when Walburga inevitably finds something to be offended over.”

“Of course,” says Lydia. “It would be my pleasure. Ada’s a good friend-,”

“And I heard about your little visit to MESP,” he cuts her off.

She stiffens minutely, before recovering her composure. “Oh, Tom, that was just-,”

“In the future, don’t cancel reservations without asking me first,” he continues smoothly. He knows why she was really there, but now is not the time to get into that. He just wants to keep her sharp. “Do you have any idea how long it took to get you and your aunt that table at Babylon Park? They don’t do refunds.” His tone is measured; more exasperated than genuinely angry. It’s important to keep a light touch with someone like Lydia; she was raised in a glass house. 

Lyle has roused himself just enough to hear the tail end of that. “Not even married yet and she’s already wasting your money,” he snickers from his slouched position. “Taking a leaf out of Cece’s book, eh Lyds?”

“I’m sorry, darling,” Lydia says, ignoring her brother’s jab, all wide-eyes and sheepish smile. “It was thoughtless of me.” She sets down her drink and moves onto the love-seat beside him, taking his hand. “Can you ever forgive me?” Her pink lips tremble in an effort to contain her laughter. He will give her that; for all her careful manners and soft voice, she is not easily intimidated or chastened. It’s refreshing, sometimes. Far too reminiscent of someone else at others.

Lyle is on his way back from the kitchen with a bottle of whiskey when the tapping comes. Tom freezes; so does Lydia; they exchange a look, and she all but leaps to her feet. “I’ll get it!” She brushes past her brother; he nearly drops the bottle, and Tom stands, all the blood rushing to his temple as he steadies himself with one hand on the sofa back. He barely restrains himself from barking at her to hurry up as she dashes back into the room, slipping in her silk stockings on the hardwood floors. 

Lyle is standing stock still, the bottle half raised to his lips.

Lydia slits open the envelope with a slice of her wand, then pulls out the notice.

Tom wordlessly extends a hand, and is pleased when it only trembles slightly.

“Congratulations,” she says haltingly, before she smiles widely as she looks up, “Minister Gaunt!”

Lyle whoops; Lydia hurls herself at Tom, letter and all, slender arms locked around his neck, kissing him on the cheek, even as he rips the letter out of her grip and scans it himself. “It’s not been officially announced yet, but-,”

When Lyle offers him the bottle he is elated enough to grab it and take a quick swallow of whiskey. It burns all the way down his throat, and Lydia releases him and stands on her tiptoes, her hands pressed to her mouth in mute delight, before she removes them and fists them in the fabric of her buttery yellow dress instead. “Well done,” she says almost hoarsely. “ _Very_ well done, Tom-,”

She sounds older when her voice is huskier like that, and it is close enough for him to be able to take her by the chin and kiss her soundly and without hesitation or measured indulgence, because for a fleeting instant she could be someone else entirely. Someone else he’s sure he’ll be seeing very soon, and not in a recycled pensieve memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoo boy. This is probably the most 'vetted' chapter in the fic so far in that I spent twice as long as usual writing and reviewing it. 
> 
> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. There were a few instances in BW where I debated switching temporarily to Tom's narration, but as I saw that story as a standalone when I was writing it, I ultimately felt like it should be Amy's uncompromising POV the entire time. I also, practically speaking, felt like most of the suspense in the story came from the readers not being sure what Tom was thinking or what his intentions were, and I didn't want to 'spoil' anything by suddenly pivoting to him. Grass Crown is a different case entirely; it's no longer just Amy's narrative, although I am sure she will still ultimately have more chapters in this fic than Tom. 
> 
> 2\. I was very nervous about writing Tom through his own eyes since I've never done it before, obviously, and because I wanted to keep him in-character with how he is perceived by Amy, while still making his POV unique. Clearly he does not view himself the way she does. I also was a little leery because I don't typically write from the POVs of more outright antagonists, and I was worried this would come across as very cliched or over-the-top, or just not terribly interesting. Ultimately I am pretty satisfied with this chapter as it stands, but there's always room for improvement and I'm sure my handling of his inner voice will change throughout the fic.
> 
> 3\. Tom. Tom is in part the big 'mystery' of the fic, because up until now we've never actually been inside his head. I wanted to preserve the suspense and tension of 'what exactly are his plans' while still making the chapter interesting to read and enjoyable (or just creepy). He *is* pretty creepy. He is also, as many commenters have pointed out, a very obsessive and possessive person, while still being able to put on the 'mask' of an intense, ambitious but well-adjusted worker every day. I did not want this chapter to just be a long slew of 'Amy Amy Amy' but I also wanted to highlight his extremely unhealthy behaviors and general lack of morals or consideration for most of the people around him.
> 
> 4\. IMO the best thing you can give any villain is *limitations*. This would not be a very interesting read if Tom was practically god-like and invulnerable, this perfect genius who is always three steps ahead or this master sorcerer. He's not. He's highly intelligent and clearly very good at thinking on his feet, but he is well aware that he is not invincible. He does not have an endless supply of money or horde of henchmen. He has to work to win people over, he has to work to make money, and he has to work to keep so many balls in the air all at once. He's very good at improvising, but he can still be quite reckless and cocky. He doesn't instantly charm anyone he meets, and he is cautious about his use of certain spells or illegal activities. Don't get me wrong, he's clearly had a lot of help and favors granted to him, but he's also had to put in some substantial effort to get to where he currently is. 
> 
> 5\. Tom's memory dependency is pretty much the HP version of stalking your ex on social media and rereading old conversations. He takes great pains to never refer to Amy by her name, even in his own thoughts, but it is obvious that some part of his private life still largely revolves around her, or his memories of her and their relationship. He constantly examines both of their past behavior in some attempt to 'rationalize' his codependent behavior towards her, and he is constantly trying to 'find' her in the people around him, in particular the women in his life. Hence him occasionally visiting a prostitute who has some physical similarities to her, and being attracted to the parts of Lydia's personality that remind him of her.
> 
> 6\. Funnily enough (or not), Tom and Matthew have ended up seeing quite a bit of each other at work! I think it's safe to say that both are still holding a grudge. If anyone was confused as to who Jaime Isola is, he was briefly featured in the epilogue of BW, and referenced in Chapter Two of this fic. Amy patched him up quite a bit back at the clinic, and he clearly feels that he owes her some debt of loyalty. Tom finds this very difficult to understand, as he doesn't really 'do' friendship.
> 
> 7\. I very much doubt anyone is surprised with the election results. 
> 
> 8\. I've recently made a fic/writing [tumblr](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/); it will mostly be for linking updates or discussing fic ideas. My inbox is open there; feel free to suggest prompts or ask questions, etc.


	11. Lydia II

LANCASHIRE, NOVEMBER 1957

The first shape to barrel out of the mist nearly knocks her off her feet. Lydia staggers backwards with a yelp as Polly’s paws scrabble down her chest before landing on all four feet, the tennis ball clutched firmly between his teeth. “Gentle,” Lydia scolds, as she scratches him behind the ears. “You’re scaring the babies.” She drops into a crouch to greet Art as she races up as well, tail wagging so hard it looks as though it might fall off. It’s only just dusk now, but the rainy weather makes it seem that much darker and later, even if it’s relatively mild in temperature for a November evening.

Her young cousins, bundled in their rain coats, hats, and matching scarves, exchange disgruntled looks. “Andra’s the baby, not me,” Bellatrix informs her heatedly, her round, pale little face set in a fierce scowl. She claps her mittened hands together in an attempt to get one of the greyhounds to approach, but Art and Polly hang back, wary after being pinched, prodded, or having their ears or tails pulled one too many times. Bella’s notoriously careless with her pets; her mother once confessed that Bellatrix had been through so many that there was something of a burgeoning animal cemetery at their country house. 

Andromeda, two years younger than her elder sister, wrinkles her sharp little nose in annoyance. “I am not! I’m four! Four’s not a baby,” she rounds on Bellatrix in a high fit of temper, stamping a small foot, “Cissy’s the baby now, be-cause she is only two,” she enunciates carefully, then raises her chin in triumph. “So there.”

“Four is a baby to six, and two is a baby to four,” Bellatrix reasons, narrowing her eyes. “So I’m still in charge of you, and you have to do what I say, Andra. Papa said so.”

“He did not!”

“He did too!”

They’ve already gotten into two near fist-fights in the hour they’ve spent outside, and Lydia is not keen on breaking up a third. Andra might be tall for her age, but Bella has a rather nasty clout and a bad habit of pulling hair. Lydia ordinarily quite enjoys being around children; they’re refreshingly open and honest, even at their cruelest and most callous, but the Black girls are enough to strain anyone’s patience, she’s sure of it. She doesn’t know how Druella can stand it all day. At this rate, they’ll wind up with half a dozen squabbling daughters along Cygnus’ quest for a son.

It’s a particularly steaming piece of gossip; Pollux Black dropped dead towards the end of ‘45, conveniently freeing Walburga Black from her father’s machinations and an unwanted engagement. She promptly put off marriage until she could snag the man of her dreams- her second cousin Orion, from a lesser Black line, and the two of them wed in ‘48, when the groom was just nineteen. As it stands, there’s been no children from the match. It’s already been decried as ‘selfish’ and ‘pigheaded’ by much of society. With birth rates plummeting, an otherwise healthy and viable Black goes ahead and weds her cousin, inbreeding the line even further? Common consensus dictates that she ought to have held her nose, laid back and thought of England, and settled down with a Montague or even a Pucey instead. Wally and Orion are both still young enough to have children, but it’s looking less likely with every year that passes.

In the meantime, dear little brother Cyg’s wife has proved quite fertile- at least when it comes to girls. If Cygnus can get a son out of Druella, he might stand a chance at snagging control of the entire House of Black. Merlin knows Walburga certainly isn’t about to roll over and hand him the property deeds and the offshore accounts. Honestly, the two of them might just go ahead and murder one another and leave poor Orion and Dru widowed. Alphard Black is likely off at some beach in Greece having a grand old laugh at their expense, although no one’s supposed to act like they remember him at all.

Lydia knows Mother’s dreadfully worried about her fertility- what is the point of a pureblood marriage if it can’t produce more purebloods- but she’s not very bothered. Tom hasn’t even mentioned it yet, although perhaps he’s just waiting until after the wedding, when he feels he can be frank with her. Either way, she’s quite certain he has no interest in being a father in the very near future. He’s very keen on putting her to work in certain circles, and she can’t be much help to him if she’s huge with child and complaining of swollen feet every five minutes.

Art permits Andromeda to come over and pet her, while Polly easily outpaces Bellatrix, ignoring her shrill demands for him to come back this instant. Lydia tries to picture what a child of her own might look like, a darling little girl, but it might as well be a muddied lump of paper mache in her brain. She supposes they ought to look like their father, if it can be helped, and Tom is quite handsome, so there’s few regrets there. He’d like that, a little doppelganger or two, eventually. Lydia does want more than one. She always wished for a brother or sister closer to her own age, as a little girl. A confidante. An ally. 

The wind suddenly picks up, cutting through the pristine hedgerows, rustling the branches of leafless autumn trees, and Lydia catches the barest snippet of a wail of agony on the breeze. Cecily’s been in labor since dawn. It’s excruciating; not her cries of pain, but that Lydia is bound here until the baby comes, instead of being down at the Ministry headquarters, at Tom’s side, smoothing the way forward and making alliances and winning hearts and minds, as she always meant to be. Instead she’s stuck here waiting for Cecily to get it over with, reassuring her mother’s frazzled nerves and entertaining her gossipy aunts and their spawn. 

But the girls are rather cute spawn, at that. Both have lost interest in the dogs and are now playing tag with each other instead; Andra runs full tilt towards the rose trellis, arms outstretched as if she expects to take flight, while Bella tears after her, boots pounding against the wet ground. She loses her balance and skids at the last moment, landing square on her rear end with a shocked yelp. Andra turns round to laugh at her, then comes over to see if she’s alright; Bellatrix promptly hurls a handful of mud in her face. Lydia exhales in amusement, then frowns as the terrace light flickers once, then twice. “Girls!” she calls out, despising how much she sounds like a schoolmarm, and not a playmate- their mother is only nine years older than her, after all- “Come back now! It’s getting too cold for you, and it’s almost time to go home for dinner!”

Thankfully. They’ve been here since what feels like daybreak. Lyle fled hours and hours ago to ‘give them some space’, which means he went to one of his clubs to drink and smoke himself into blissful oblivion, expecting to be summoned when it’s over with. Her father’s barricaded himself in his study, to no one’s surprise, complaining of the noise, and her mother’s been in a state all day, breathlessly interrogating the legion of midwives and constantly asking if they ought to send for a healer.

The baby was breech, but they managed to turn it a few hours ago. It’s just a question of dilation now, and by all accounts she’s not there yet. Lydia isn’t a very squeamish person, but that doesn’t mean she necessarily relishes in the constant stream of graphic information being delivered to her. It’s as if they expect her to whip out a quill and parchment and begin taking notes. Sweet Circe. This is why they just drug muggle women when they go into labor, and tie them to the bed for good measure, in case they wake in the middle of it. Rather simplifies the entire process. 

She scourgifies most of the mud off of the girls’ clothes on their way back into the house, but one of the paw stains on her fur-trimmed blue wool coat. The muff’s looking a bit bedraggled; she wrenches her cold hands out of it and rubs them together instead, handing it off to a waiting house elf as they come in through one of the back doors. “Lydia, your hair,” Cordelia says reprovingly as she meets them in the hall. “It’s practically plastered to your scalp, darling, you look like something the cat dragged in.” 

Lydia blinks in irritation against the blast of hot air from the drying charm sent her way, but just smiles brightly at Bellatrix and Andromeda instead, as they take off their coats and reluctantly replace their rainboots with their good house shoes. “Did you have fun? The dogs were excited to see you, weren’t they?”

Bella huffs. Andra wants her mummy. Both take off in the direction of the parlor, ignoring Cordelia’s strained calls for them to slow down and be careful. “Thank God you and Lyle weren’t so close in age,” she mutters after them. “I would have gone mad, I really would have.”

“I’m sure you would have risen to the occasion,” Lydia says with a slightly sardonic edge that does not go unnoticed.

Cordelia purses her lips and shakes her head. “You have no idea the sort of sacrifices we all make for our children. Really. You can’t be married soon enough- then you’ll start to understand, really, you will.” She takes Lydia by the arm and draws her close, almost furtive. “There will be none of this nonsense when you’re in the childbed. Don’t worry. We’ll make a holiday of it and go to one of those retreats up north-,”

“Excellent, so I can have an entire coven praying over my womb and burning sage while they chant in Latin?” Lydia rolls her eyes. “I’d rather not, Mother. No need to make a High Mass of it.”

“Don’t be so flip,” Cordelia scolds, stung. “This is the most important work of all. Furthering the bloodline. Creating more of us. In numbers, there is power. You know well enough what happens to our kind when we are scattered and disenfranchised. The greatest gift any woman could give this world is another witch or wizard.”

“But especially a wizard,” Lydia says under her breath. 

Cordelia pauses, and her brown eyes darken slightly. “In this case, yes. It would be a wonderful boon. But if it doesn’t come to pass, they can always try again. The sooner the better. Why, after your brother was born, I was right as rain within a scant few weeks. That’s the beauty of it. We completely lack the sort of muggle frailty-,”

Most muggle women would probably count their frailty and lackluster medicine as a blessing in disguise, if it keeps their grubby husbands out of their beds for several months, Lydia thinks, but knows better than to say it. She follows her mother back into the parlor, where her aunts take up three different parts of the room. 

Druella, the youngest, the last child of her grandfather’s second marriage, stands before the massive aquarium, towheaded Narcissa on her hip, the only daughter to have inherited her mother’s flaxen hair. Bellatrix and Andromeda are still squabbling beside her, but they’re at least a little distracted by the fish. 

Clara reclines on the newly reupholstered sofa, tea cup in hand, complaining loudly about her Bulstrode husband, as usual, while she recounts her own birth story, yet again. Ambrose is eleven years old now, one would think she’d have gotten over it, but Clara’s still incensed that Eugene slept through it. 

Therese, dear old Tess, the eldest Rosier daughter, is standing in front of the fire as if to warm herself. Her hands are always cold. It’s one of Lydia’s earliest memories; her aunt’s soft, cold hands. She saw far more of Tess over the course of her childhood than either of her younger aunts; Clara was fourteen when Lydia was born, and Druella was nine. Neither were particularly interested in their cold old brother’s shrieking infant. It was Tess, poor childless Tess, registered metamorphmagus Therese Rosier, who was recruited to go about the horrid business of rearing Lydia. 

In some ways, perhaps it’s been a blessing. Her aunt took on the dirty work of parenting that her mother and father were loathe to. Perhaps it’s staved off some bitterness towards them; all of Lydia’s childhood memories are wrapped up in her aunt instead. Therese practically lived with them from the time Lydia was three or four to when she finally came of age. 

“You are the best thing to ever happen to her,” her uncle Tony once told her, smiling warmly down at her when she was six or seven. “Tessa always wanted a little girl, and then you came along. You might not be ours, but you’re still her blood.” Lydia has always shared more than mere blood with her aunt; their essential composition is the same. Their bodies are capable of the same machinations. Their thinking follows the same familiar grooves, like a gramophone. 

Lydia meets Tess’ jade green gaze now, feels the familiar oddness of seeing your exact eyes reflected in another’s face, and smiles banally. “Come warm up before you catch a chill,” her mother urges, steering Lydia towards the hearth. She rests an elbow along the marble mantle, as Clara reluctantly halts her complaints in order to help Druella wrestle her daughters back into their coats and shoes, even as they insist they want to stay and are not hungry in the least.

“I suppose Gene will be a bit put out if he comes home to an empty house,” Clara sighs as if she’s about to be sent into the trenches. “And Tulip always needs supervision in the kitchen- really, the only reason we haven’t been rid of her is because she used to be his nursemaid-,”

“You’ll be staying until the birth, then?” Lydia casually asks Therese, who nods.

“Of course. I was there the entire time for you and Lyle.” She frowns. “Your father should send for him. A witch needs the support of her husband at a time like this. Merlin knows it hasn’t been easy on Cecily.”

“He’d do her more harm than good,” Lydia stifles a small yawn, and props her chin up on her fist. “They were hardly close even before the wedding.”

Tess frowns in disapproval. “I warned Gil about that match, but as usual, he had little interest in listening. Our father would have turned over in his grave to see it- Cecily is a sweet girl, of course, but a Wilson? He might as well have wed a Potter,” she huffs. 

“The money certainly helped,” Lydia murmurs under her breath.

“Don’t be crude,” her aunt says. There’s another sharp, distant cry from upstairs. 

“And that’s our cue to leave,” Clara drawls, standing up from the sofa. “Bellatrix, stop pinching the baby. Really, Dru, control your children-,”

As Druella and Clara make their exit, insisting someone write with news of the birth as soon as it happens, Lydia follows Therese and Cordelia upstairs, the sounds of Cecily’s labor growing louder and more disconcerting the closer they get, ringing out through the mostly empty house. 

When Lyle married Cecily, he moved out of his boyhood bedroom and into one of the suites, since it’d be unbearably awkward to be bringing his wife into a room still cluttered with schoolbooks, quidditch memorabilia, and the occasional heap of dirty laundry. If they had the money, he might have moved into a well-maintained guest house on the property, like a gardener’s cottage or gatehouse, but those fell into disrepair years ago. At some point- ten, fifteen years from now, their parents will cede control of the manor house and most of the finances to Lydia’s brother and sister-in-law, and hope and pray they don’t run it into the ground.

Thank Morgana that Cecily’s father is a lawyer. They’re going to need some recommendations for a good accountant. 

Lydia feels as though she walked into some grotesque Renaissance painting. Cecily is sprawled in the middle of the four-postered bed, shift and dressing gown hiked up around her hips, legs ajar, writing as if she’s being stung by a thousand bees, while the midwife, a no-nonsense witch in her fifties, and her apprentice daughter, a nervous looking girl who’s sweating just as much as Cecily, hold up her legs and command her to bear down.

“Where’s Lyle?” Cecily chokes out as soon as she locks eyes with the Rosier women.

“He’s on his way,” Lydia lies smoothly, and exchanges a look with Tess while her mother hurries to Cecily’s side, smoothing her mussed blonde hair back from her red face. Cecily’s own mother died when she was a teenager, so her in-laws are really all she has, apart from her father. Lydia almost feels sorry for her. Still, it’s almost over and done with.

“Baby’s crowning,” the midwife says. “Come on, love, you’ve got to push for me-,”

“It hurts,” Cecily rasps. “It hurts, make it stop-,”

“The pain is telling you to push,” Therese snaps, and Lydia flinches at her suddenly harsh and commanding tone, an old instinct erupting out of nowhere. Neither her mother nor her aunt notice, their focus solely on Cecily and the future of the family crowning between her legs.

“A full head of hair- come on now, push again-,”

Cecily grunts and then pushes again, and Lydia takes one of her clammy hands, even if she wants to recoil at the feel of it, while Cordelia takes the other. “Just breathe,” her mother is saying, “breathe, and let it come naturally-,”

“Head’s out-,”

“Stop,” Therese orders, and Cecily stops, “the cord’s around the neck-,”

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” the apprentice has hoisted Cecily’s leg over her shoulder so she can lean down and use both gloved hands to untangle the cord. “Good, keep pushing-,”

“Is Lyle here yet?” Cecily asks frantically. “I want him to see-,”

“Don’t be silly, darling,” Cordelia soothes, “no man wants to see his wife like this.”

Cecily makes a hoarse sobbing noise that is either borne out of pain or sheer frustration, and grits her teeth so hard Lydia swears she can hear them grinding together.

“Shoulders are through, come on-,”

“Oh,” Lydia says in shock, as the infant slides out in a flood of liquid. She’s never seen a child being born before, never even seen a picture of a newborn before, and Cecily takes her alarm for an ill omen, struggling to raise her head.

“What’s wrong, what’s happened-,”

“Nothing,” the midwife announces with a smile, as the baby begins to shriek. “She’s perfectly fine, Mrs. Rosier. You have a very healthy little girl.”

Tess sighs audibly from her position at the foot of the bed, and says quietly, “I’ll go let Gilbert know,” before slipping from the room. Lydia’s mother appears visibly crestfallen, but quickly masks it as she kisses Cecily on the forehead in a maternal manner. 

“Oh, well done, darling, well done- look, they’re drying her off.”

The smell is almost bad enough to make Lydia feel a little sick. She extricates her hand from Cecily’s and takes a slight step back as the screeching red infant is placed on Cecily’s chest. Cecily drinks in the sight of her daughter- Lydia’s niece- hungrily, then immediately pulls down her shift so she can begin to nurse, stroking the infant’s downy little head. 

“She’s beautiful,” she says. “Oh, isn’t she just gorgeous, Lydia?”

Lydia has never seen an uglier little creature in her life, and that’s including some of their house elves, but she nods and smiles anyways. “What will you call her?”

Cecily winces as she attempts to get the baby to latch right away, biting her lower lip, and then when the infant starts to greedily suckle, tenses, before saying, “Caroline, of course. For my mother. You don’t think Lyle will mind terribly?”

Lydia’s not sure if she’s referring to the name, or the baby’s sex. 

Alongside the exhausted midwives, they all wait the customary ninety minutes to see if the infant demonstrates any evidence of metamorphmagus abilities. It’s supposedly estimated that over ninety percent of all metamorphmagi will manifest their skin-changing within the first hour of birth, if not sooner. The few who take longer to do so are expected to be immediately reported and registered with the Ministry as soon as it becomes evident. 

The time limit is passed without incident. Cecily seems more relieved than anything else, and Lydia can’t quite blame her. No one really wants to give birth to a child who they might not recognize. No one wants to lose track of their baby’s eyes and mouth and nose. Caroline falls asleep. The midwives pack up their things and promise to be back for Cecily’s check-up tomorrow afternoon. Therese throws open the windows to air out the room, letting in the smell of the rain soaked night and the sound of an owl hooting from a nearby tree. 

Lydia holds her niece for a few minutes, as is expected of her, and decides she really looks nothing like Lyle. Caroline has Cecily’s nose and the hair on her pink head is so blonde its practically white. She’s very fat; no wonder the labor was so dreadful. But Cecily doesn’t seem to mind it now; she all but demands her daughter back, then tucks Caroline between her arm and her breast, stroking her blanketed cocoon as though it were a precious jewel.

Lydia finds children endearing in temporary doses, but she struggles to imagine feeling any great surge of love and affection for shrieking infant constantly leaking tears, mucus, or excrement. She doesn’t remember her mother holding her much, or really even looking at her all that much until she was at least five or six. Maybe it will be different when she has her own baby. She will look at them and their fine dark hair and their perfect nose and lips and love them instantly for being so precious.

She wonders if Amy Benson’s daughter has dark hair and high cheekbones. Maybe not. Mae Benson could be a chubby little redhead, for all Lydia knows. But one has to admit it’s food for thought. It’s not so often one gets a different picture painted of the same person so many times. You’d think Amy was a shapeshifter herself. Which one is it, Lydia amuses herself by thinking, when she has the time to spare, who are you, really? Is she the mudblood guttersnipe who frolicked through school smelling of potting soil and quidditch dirt? Is she the hardscrabble healer who pulled herself up by her own belt-loops? Or is she the beleaguered unwed mother with a conveniently eleven year old bastard child?

She waits up for Lyle in the library, knowing that’s where he’ll skulk to after his chat with their father. Tracing a line through the dust on the long mahogany table with a single finger, she once again maps out Amy Benson’s unassuming features in her minds. It’s not derived from jealousy or hatred- Lydia rather liked speaking with her, for all that both of them were so overtly holding their tongues- but out of simple curiosity, and curiosity, Lydia can safely vouch for, is a very powerful thing.

She just wants to understand. Either Lyle was massively exaggerating, or misheard some rumours, this is the only person she has ever heard of Tom ever being ‘close with’- not just in school, at all. Lydia doesn’t hate Tom. Most of the time, she is fairly content in his company. There might be no deep affection or genuine pleasure at spending time with him, but it’s not uncomfortable either. But she does know him. Not nearly as well as she will after they’re married, but she knows enough. Tom does not have friends. He never had friends. The idea of him pursuing any sort of connection with another person that did not promise some sort of reward for him is ludicrous. 

So why her? Maybe Lyle is more insightful than she is willing to give him credit for. Maybe it was pure physical attraction or some sort of desire to ‘deflower’ part of his childhood. Lydia could understand that; she represented something to him, and whatever that was, he needed to have it or take it or somehow claim ownership of it. But Lydia has met her now. And as much as she was well aware that Amy Benson would be leaving her interview at around that time, as triumphant as she felt when they happened upon Lucinda and she heard the door opening-

Well, Amy wasn’t quite what she’d expected. Lydia had been astute enough to predict light hair and light eyes. Short, too, she’d wagered- Tom was the sort who’d want to be comfortably seen as the more physically dominant one in any kind of relationship, and he was hardly strapping with muscle and brawn himself, so it’d made sense he’d be attracted to more petite women. Even the freckles she could have made an educated guess on. Something a bit more down to earth or even plain. He’d want to feel like the more sophisticated one.

But Lydia had envisioned perhaps a slender, petite blonde with big blue eyes and a shy smile, who spoke in a soft, hesitant sort of manner and who had some obvious nervous tics- pulling on her hair, for example, or a slight stammer, or a habit of blushing vividly when spoken directly to. A wallflower, really, the type of woman who would have been an awkward, reticent sort of schoolgirl who’d have been dumbstruck at the thought of someone like an adolescent Tom- handsome, alarmingly intelligent, witty and charismatic- taking any kind of interest in her.

Well, let it never be said Lydia Rosier was a seer. The woman who’d strode out of the potions chamber with an easy sort of athletic confidence- someone utterly at home in their own body, which was rare enough, especially for most of the women Lydia knew- had been nothing of the sort. For a few moments Lydia had been silently berating herself, convinced she’d bungled the entire thing- ‘Amy Benson’ was a very common sort of name, after all- until she saw the note of recognition in her eyes. They’d never met before, but Amy had recognized her, and not just in the casual sense. There had been a lingering beat of familiarity, like two people who’d briefly lived in the same house at two different times.

And the wariness. Yes. Everyone who’d ever been anywhere near ‘close’ to Tom had that sort of guarded wariness to them. 

So it had been the right Amy Benson. But she was not a slender, petite blonde with big blue eyes and a shy smile. She did not speak in a manner that was soft nor hesitant, and she did not come across as nervous or anxious in the least- not in her speech, not in her body language. If Amy Benson were a kind of flower, Lydia had quickly determined, she was no restrained wallflower nor a blushing English rose. She was something weedy, hardy, and determined, wedging its way up through cobblestones or concrete, grasping for the sun, thick stem thronged with thorns.

She had a farm girl's build, really- nothing slender or delicate in the least about her, no twiggy limbs or long, graceful neck. Amy Benson had very well-muscled shoulders for a woman, short, powerful legs, thicker arms than was strictly fashionable, and that ridiculous green blouse with a portrait collar about a year out of style did little to hide it. She’d looked like the kind of woman who could be reliably be counted upon to get up at the crack of dawn and start making enough bread to feed a starving eastern European village. 

Her hands were leathered and calloused and her skin had seen far more sun than could ever be healthy- she had tan on top of brown freckles and more freckles on top of that, her nails were short and stubby, one of her thumbs looked like it had been broken before. Despite her height there was nothing girlish about her; she wore makeup but very much looked her age, something Lydia’s mother and aunts would have been horrified by, for what was the point of doing up your face if it wasn’t to look younger? 

Her hair had been light brown with sun bleached highlights from years in a Mediterranean climate and had been pulled back in a frizzing ponytail, likely due to the steam from the brewing. Her eyes were blue but not the dark, piercing blue Lydia had envisioned- something lighter and duller instead, and they weren’t very big at all. When she smiles they crinkled too much. Her mouth was too wide for her face, and her nose wasn’t small enough to be considered appealing. Her eyelashes were short. Her sleeves had still been pushed up when she’d greeted them, revealing downy blonde hair on her arms.

Lydia could have- and did- catalog a hundred or more flaws, defects, or inconsistencies with Amy Benson’s appearance. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t even pretty, really. She was no troll, and certainly most men weren’t all that picky, but she was not any sort of woman one might look twice at on the street, or approach to flirt coyly with at a dance. She’d probably never been to a dance in her life. She barely even resembled a witch. There was no great mystery lurking behind those watery blue eyes. There was no enigmatic glint to her smile.

But when she smiled- genuinely smiled, not that close-mouthed near grimace she’d displayed all throughout their luncheon, but afterwards, Lydia had watched carefully as she headed off with Lucinda Amell, watched Lucinda whisper something to her and Amy Benson break into a free, genuine grin- well, there’d been something to say for that, even if her teeth were crooked. She had a nice, infectious sort of warmth to her when she smiled. Nothing outstanding or unusual, just comforting, in a sense, like a campfire, that made you want to draw a little closer. And she was a graceful sort of person in spite of all the rest- not graceful like a dancer, not light on her feet or airy in her movements, but graceful in that she always seemed to know where all her limbs were going. She walked solidly, comfortably, and when she ate she took practiced, efficient bites and confident drags of her drink, not in the least self conscious or timid about it. Uncle Tony had declared her ‘a bit brazen, and obviously we knew nothing about the child, but competent all the same’. Brazenly competent. Was that any way to describe her? Lydia isn’t sure. 

There was something shameless about Amy Benson, and she thought that might be the spark that could plausibly have attracted Tom. Not in that she was a flirt or arrogant or obnoxious in her manners, but that she gave off the impression of someone who didn’t care what you thought, and who was certain they never would. No pretense. No hesitation. No eagerness to please or desire to placate. She was the sort of woman, Lydia thought, who if you were to threaten her, she’d not cringe back in fear or rile in indignation, but rather stand there firmly, coolly, arms folded under her chest, regarding you with a raised eyebrow- Is that all you got?

She can see where that might have spurred him on. The desire to prove himself. The way she perhaps incited someone with her unflappable attitude and frank voice. If Lydia tried to explain it to anyone else, like Lyle, she knows it’d sound ludicrous. They could not be more different. Tom might have come from… reduced circumstances, but even in the depths of that Lydia cannot easily picture him and a young Amy intertwined or involved in any way beyond the most shallow of connections. 

And still… the appeal could perhaps be teased out of it. Someone he knew, someone he’d grown up with, who’d undoubtedly seen him at his very lowest. She’d been a Hufflepuff; she was likely very loyal, even when she disagreed with him, and perhaps protective as well, feeling some sort of desire to shelter poor, fragile Tom and his tremendous intellect from a rough and tough world. Lydia tries to rather clinically imagine the two of them, young and as innocent as Tom might ever have been, holding hands in their school uniforms, or kissing, or sitting together on a train station bench, luggage piled up.

And there was something guiltily intriguing about the thought of the child. No proof of it, of course- Amy could have been with any number of men, at any time, and who knows when the girl was conceived, exactly, but wasn’t it just so odd that someone with such promising exam scores would elect to go immediately abroad as what was essentially a combat medic, instead of heading for St Mungo’s? That said young woman would then find herself washed up on Gibraltar, instead of returning to familiar old England, and doubtless with a child by that time, no less? 

Why in the world would any woman, pregnant and vulnerable, not choose to come back to what was known and safe? Why would she stay away? Why would she stay away for eleven years, only to suddenly return on the eve of her daughter’s entrance into Hogwarts- and therefore magical society? Perhaps it’s the dramatic in her, but Lydia smells a rat. If not a rat, at the very least a shrew or vole. 

Say Lyle was correct, and Tom had long been through with her by the time they were approaching graduation. Poor little heartbroken Amy Benson flings herself at someone- anyone else- and in a cruel twist of irony, falls pregnant. She discovers this while abroad. The sensible thing to do- the practical thing to do- would have been to immediately return to England and privately address this- either by an abortion or agreeing to marry the father- or do the same thing abroad- procure an abortion or find a man willing to marry her, maybe even convince him that the child was his. It doesn’t add up. Either Amy Benson has a damnable stubborn streak, or she was rebuffed by the father and couldn’t bring herself to get rid of the child, or-

Or she is hiding something, or was hiding herself and said child for over a decade, and has only recently decided to scamper back out into the light?

It’s nothing but idle speculation, of course. A few rumours do not a scandal make. Surely if Tom had any great reason to suspect something along these lines, he would have had it handled years ago. Paid her off or had the child taken away and sent to live with trusted allies, or taken care of it himself. Lydia’s not naive, nor is she blind. Neither is he. She doesn’t need to be told to tread lightly. She’s been treading lightly all her life, and she’s well versed in the consequences of being too heavy-handed, of demanding anything. 

So it’s not as if she has any dire plans for the immediate future. But one does have a duty to be aware. To be watchful. She didn’t come this far to suddenly find herself on the tracks with a train bearing down on her, full speed ahead. Besides, isn’t that a crucial part of every marriage? Identifying certain pitfalls well ahead of the time? If anything, she’s doing both of them a favor by keeping her eyes and ears open. Tom might even thank her for it.

She lets herself have a little laugh at the thought of that, and then Lyle slouches into the lamp-lit room. Lydia resumes picking at the tray of food Kit laid out for her ages ago, and silently offers him a glass of water. “You look awful.” He has dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes are rumpled. 

“I just came off a twelve hour stint at the Ministry-,”

“And then four hours at the bar?”

“And I’m not in the mood for your games,” he all but snarls, snatching the glass from her and drinking greedily. 

Lydia huffs. “Don’t be such a child. You’re a father now. It’s unbecoming.”

“Right,” he snorts, setting the empty glass down, and sinking into the leatherbound seat across from her. “Caroline. After her bloody mother. Of course.”

Lydia clasps her hands in front of her, straightens in her seat. “And you would have preferred a little Lyle Jr.?”

“I would have preferred to be done with the entire matter,” he snaps. “To not have Father breathing down my fucking neck over it, or Mother buying fertility poppets from the market-,”

“They’re just trying to help, Lyle.”

“Of course, you’d know all about their help,” he retorts, and she blinks rapidly, feeling her face shift, tighten, shift again.

“I didn’t mean that,” he says hastily, guilty. “Lydia- don’t. I’m sorry. That was- unnecessary.”

“You’re upset,” she says stiffly. “You’re allowed to be blunt. But I think you should remember that your behavior around Cecily-,”

“Lydia,” he’s groaning again-

“-Isn’t exactly conducive to having another child. Would it really kill you to at least pretend? You needn’t forever. She’s not some hag from the Black Forest, Lyle, she’s perfectly tolerable-,”

He holds up a finger. “When you’re married yourself, then you can give me advice on how to be the perfect husband, little sister. Until then-,”

“Fine,” she says spitefully. “Do just as you please. What do I care? It’s only our family name.”

“Well, it’s not as if you’ll be a Rosier much longer,” he says coldly, then hesitates. Poor Lyle. Never able to follow through. It must be so unattractive to Cecily. He can’t even commit to being cruel. “How have things been, with Tom?” 

This is the first he’s ever asked about it.

“Wonderful,” Lydia says. “You know that. He’s become quite fond of me.”

Lyle is watching her warily. “Do you remember what we spoke about, in the beginning? Your expectations? I- I just wouldn’t like to see you hurt, Lydia. You have a good heart.” He says it as if he knows her at all, his baby sister, the one he left behind when he scurried off to Hogwarts, tail between his legs. A good heart. As if he knows anything about what resides above her rib-cage.

“I remember,” she says, standing up, the tray in hand. “Of course I do. You needn’t worry about that. Now, why don’t you go make yourself useful for once, and acquaint yourself with your daughter? Don’t worry,” her lip curls slightly. “She’s utterly normal. Aunt Tess won’t be swooping in to tutor her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. This chapter was initially supposed to cover way more ground but I ultimately decided it'd be better for us to have a closer look at Lydia and her family dynamics, since we haven't heard directly from her since Chapter 3, which was admittedly pretty veiled when it came to her intentions/character. This chapter was still holding a lot back but I hope it was a slightly deeper insight into her personality and general attitude towards her life.
> 
> 2\. Family tree: Lydia's grandfather, Lucien Rosier, was married twice. His first marriage produced her aunt Therese (Tess) and her father Gilbert. His second marriage produced her aunts Clara and Druella. Therese, who we've already seen some of, albeit through Amy's eyes, is married to Antony Nott. They have no children. Like Lydia, she is a meta, but a registered one. She tutored Lydia extensively throughout her childhood, and maybe not just in academics. Clara is married to a Bulstrode; they have one son Mae's age, Ambrose. Druella, as in canon, is married to Cygnus Black, the younger brother of Walburga Black. She has three little girls who we are all familiar with: Bellatrix, Andromeda, and Narcissa. The Black Sisters are therefore Lydia's first cousins. 
> 
> 3\. The birth dates for the Black family tree according to the wiki are wack because JK Rowling isn't that great at math. Therefore they've been changed to make them slightly less wack. No one is getting married at 13 or having kids while still pubescent themselves in this fic. I'm not into the whole 'the purebloods are still stuck in the middle ages' fanon trope, as was probably established in earlier chapters. So hopefully no one is too confused about the connections between the Black and Rosier families. Sirius and Regulus, have, of course, not been born yet.
> 
> 4\. Given the historic ties between midwifery and accusations of witchcraft, I've always headcanoned that the vast majority of magical children are born at home, not in a hospital setting unless something is seriously wrong. Wizards seem like they'd be into pretty 'natural' childbirths compared to the trend of the 1950s in general to be all about medical interventions and sedation, etc. You can look it up if you like, the history of childbirth throughout the decades is pretty gnarly, especially when it comes to how women were treated.
> 
> 5\. Lydia is obviously a lot less naive and sheltered than she pretends, but she has been genuinely sort of cloistered in some ways that would be typical of the time period. Her sex ed was not exactly stellar and she has never seen childbirth or been around newborn babies before this. In fact, the overall trend in the 1950s was that it was seen as obscene for women who were obviously 'big' with pregnancy to be going out in public. The popular style of swing or babydoll coats at the time was to try to help hide a pregnancy so a woman could have more freedom to go out and do her shopping without getting judged. Fathers were generally not involved in the delivery or present for the birth.
> 
> 6\. The Rosiers were hoping for a grandson to help secure the family line, as they've been whittled down, like most pureblood families, to a pretty small number of witches and wizards, most of whom have had some problems reproducing. There's also the fact that Lyle and Cecily are just not very fond of one another, and neither is exactly eager to get working on baby number two ASAP.
> 
> 7\. I wanted to give a rundown of Lydia's impression of Amy, since they will be seeing more of each other in this fic. I've also never gotten the chance to describe Amy through someone else's eyes before in such detail, and it clearly was not going to happen in Tom's POV. I don't plan on writing Lydia as this sort of catty for no reason jealous type, so I wanted to express how much she is really intrigued by Amy, rather than right off the bat threatened or upset. 
> 
> 8\. Lydia fancies herself as being exceptionally observant and insightful. She is still a biased POV and so all her comments shouldn't necessarily be taken as Word of God or infallible statements of fact. However, she is more aware than most of the people around her give her credit for, and she has her own agendas at play, which will be steadily revealed in the future.
> 
> 9\. This fic takes place very soon after Tom's election win. Lydia is temporarily homebound with the birth of her niece, much to her dismay. His move into power will be covered in much more detail in the next couple chapters.
> 
> 10\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com).


	12. Amy V

HOGWARTS, NOVEMBER 1957

Amy does not bother to waste her free time after the election results are announced to read the gleaming full-page spread of the Daily Prophet devoted to the hours before and after the votes were tallied, nor does she tune in to the multitude of radio talk shows eagerly debating what Gaunt’s first move once in office will be. She does not begin to mark down the days remaining until the Winter Solstice, December 21st, when Wilhelmina Tuft will yield her seat as Minister and majority of the Wizengamot to Tom Gaunt. She does not bemoan or rejoice at the current state of affairs alongside her colleagues in the faculty lounge.

Rather, she writes her will, or at least a rough draft of it. She doesn’t- can’t- have a witness for it, but she uses Legal Ink, which supposedly enchants the document to the extent that it should at least be able to be argued in court as a valid representation of her intentions while living. It hardly matters, does it? If she does wind up dead in a ditch somewhere as a direct result- or aftereffect- of Tom taking the office of Minister, then it’s not as if some scrap of paper is really going to much to impede his will. 

But she has to try, doesn’t she? She always has to try, and even if it offers absolutely no legal shield, at least it might be some sort of… proclamation of her desires, or her wishes, or at least let know Mae that she- she only wanted her to be safe, and happy, and free to live her life exactly as she pleased. But Amy never gets very far past ‘Dear Mae’, and she’s always been rubbish when it came to passionate declarations of feeling via pen and paper. She gives up, and shifts to more practical matters instead-

_Vera and Danny,_

_In the event that I’m no longer-_

_In case I’m unable to-_

_If there should come a time when-_

Finally, she settles for the bluntest weapon. 

_Please take Mae in until she comes of age. I don’t expect you to treat her your own child, but I know you will be kind. Don’t let her use me not being there as an excuse to behave like a selfish twit. Don’t let her leave school early, and don’t let her dye her hair. Also, please ensure she eats three square meals a day when she’s with you, and check to make sure she’s really in bed when she claims she is, because she likes to stay up past midnight with a book and a torch._

_If she doesn’t know the truth yet at that point, I’ve enclosed another letter for her to read, as it wouldn’t be fair to expect you two to explain things. I imagine she’ll be very angry. Tell her I’m very sorry. I did what I thought was best for the both of us. It’s not fair to the two of you, either- you shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of this. If you feel it’s too much, Edward and Patricia O’Neill would likely be willing to assist with Mae’s upbringing, and perhaps they could take her abroad with them in the future. She might do better outside of Britain._

_I will ask you to keep Mae away from Tom, assuming he’s survived me. I will not ask you to risk your lives or your family’s welfare for my daughter’s sake. All I ask is that you delay that meeting for as a long as feasibly possible. I’d rather she have the maturity to handle his predilections. I understand this entire situation is quite frankly, shite, and most of that is on my shoulders. You’ve both been incredibly kind to us over the years, and V, you have always been there when I needed it. I know you’ll be there for Mae too._

But try as she might to put pen to paper for that ‘other’ letter, she can’t. It feels too soon. It’s too much. She’s overreacting, catastrophizing. She doesn’t want to tempt fate anymore than she already has. Maybe securing the ring will take a backseat to much greater concerns now that he’s slated to become Minister. She doesn’t even know- well, she has her suspicions- the point is, she can’t prove there’s even any legitimate sort of curse or enchantment on it. Maybe he just wanted her paranoid and grasping for answers. She’s been back in Britain for months now, and there’s been no attempts to contact her- he could easily find a way to get some sort of threatening message to her, if he liked, and she doesn’t think she’s ever been followed or spied on while in Hogsmeade.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? How does she know? Ultimately, she doesn’t. And every time she thinks about trying to turn the tables- going directly to Dumbledore, laying down the facts, appealing to someone else in power, maybe one of the higher ranking potioneers- she loses her nerve. It’s pathetic. She doesn’t want to rock the boat, now that she’s in one. When it was just her paddling alone at a sea with Mae, she almost felt more free. Captain of her own fate and all that rubbish. Now she’s here, and she’s grateful, of course, thankful- she’s always known how to be thankful- but she also feels backed into a corner. 

Maybe that’s what he wanted all along. Goad her into doing something stupid, so she’d walk right into whatever he has planned. If he has something planned. That’s what Amy lies awake and night and thinks about it, paralyzed not with fear but an awful sort of slow, rotting, musty dread. She can smell it on herself. During the day she is a professor and a colleague and a friend and mother and it’s easy to forget, but at night, in the dark, she might as well be eighteen and pregnant again, wondering if she was going to wake up in the morning and see his face. 

Some horrible part of her almost wishes something would happen. Like ripping off the plaster, picking off the scab. Almost wishes he’d make a move, rather than this slow burning stand-off, her at one end of a long table, him at the other. But that’s ludicrous. Of course she doesn’t want anything to happen. Not to her, not to Mae, not to the school or to her friends. She should be grateful to him, in a very twisted sense. Grateful that he’s not more impulsive or ruled by passion. It’s given her time to plan a defence, hasn’t it? Think of ways to forestall. 

Amy’s already decided that if- when, a sick little voice hisses- if anything were to happen, she hopes it’s quiet and private. He will wait until he has the ring back, or even knows where it is, and he’ll likely be so relieved and impatient that it will be quick. Quick and painless. That’s what they speculate about the Killing Curse, don’t they? That you don’t feel anything at all. It’s just like having the wind knocked out of you, only you never get it back. Amy has seen it happen, heard it too- that great rushing of wind, like the onset of a storm rattling through the eaves and shingles of an old house. Teddy once said he thought it sounded like an angel gasping for breath, and then a panicked, divine exhale, and that was that. Gone. Blotted out. 

She could almost accept that. She’s had thirty decent years. In the grand scheme of things, she’s been quite lucky. She lived through two simultaneous world wars, multiple bombings, has almost drowned, fell down two very dark holes, has run through the forests of France, driven through fields full of unexploded shells, evaded nasty curses thrown her way, dodged a few bullets, come face to face with some very dangerous people, made it through grueling childbirth, raised a child more or less to the edge of adolescence, and saved many, many lives. 

That sounds like a pretty good run. If there were some great countdown clock, warning her that her time was almost through, she thinks she could come to terms with it. She’s had her fun, time to let someone else take her place. She’ll go wherever it is people like her go, after, and that’ll be it. Book closed. It’s just the thought of Mae coming with her- she can’t tolerate that. Mae hasn’t had thirty decent years. She hasn’t even had twenty. Mae has too much to do. 

Mae needs to grow up and wear pretty dresses and go on dates and go out dancing and drink too much with her friends and make mistakes that seem humiliating in the moment but will be funny later on. She needs to take her exams and graduate and get a good job somewhere and be independent and not rely on anyone for anything. She needs to fall in love and have horrific rows but work it out and get married and have children. She needs to grow old. Amy will accept nothing less than a full, insatiable life for her. 

But in between those grim little lines of thought, she still has things to do; lesson plans to write and classes to teach and potions storage rooms to organize. She lucky if she has the energy to want to do anything but sit in her office and stare at the ceiling at the end of the day, or make tired conversation over dinner with the rest of the teachers, commiserating about juvenile delinquents and unfortunate scheduling. She’s gone out maybe thrice into Hogsmeade since the term started, twice for dinner at the Hog’s Head with Iris Penvenen and Sidney Finch, and she counts it as a good weekend if she sees Mae a few times and is able to catch up on some gossip with Lucinda or Kalliope Witherspoon.

Then there’s the teaching itself; to Amy’s mild surprise, she really doesn’t mind teaching- when it comes to the younger years. They might be more excitable and impulsive, difficult to ever turn her back on, but the first, second, and third years also tend to be more positive and earnest, eager to please and all wide-eyed awe when she demonstrates the effects of a potion or a particular ingredient, smiling with pride when they succeed at a brew or answer a question correctly. After that… she’s not looking forward to seeing Mae become a teenager, if this is what’s awaiting them. 

The fourth years and above tend to be… difficult. Not in that they’re actively causing trouble or mouthing off, really, but that they’re consumed by never-ending petty feuds and fights, divided into strict cliques, prone to procrastinating and then lying about it, sloppy out of carelessness, not lack of skill, and Christ, would it kill them to just quietly listen the first time around, instead of constantly whispering and passing notes while she’s trying to explain something? Amy knows part of it is because she’s young, and new, and doesn’t look much like they might have expected their Potions Master too, especially since she’s following Slughorn. The Slytherins especially have been quite obvious with their displeasure; they went from being the coddled favorites to being treated just like any other student, and they’re not clearly not thrilled with that.

But it’s not just them; as it turns out, houses don’t have much to do with temperaments, and two Hufflepuffs are just as likely to get into an argument and accidentally scald someone as two Gryffindors, or as a Gryffindor and a Ravenclaw, and so on- If Amy thought having to manage Mae’s moodiness was exhausting, well, it was nothing compared to juggling twenty-something adolescent egos at a time. 

Someone is always trying to show off and making a stupid mistake, or snickering with a friend at someone else’s incompetence with a cauldron, or messing with their wand when they shouldn’t be, or actively botching their partner’s potion because they think it’s funny, or making a mess in the supply closet, or complaining to her about someone else cheating off them, or cutting themselves with their knives, or dropping their wand in their potion-

It’s unending. Her only respite are the highly focused and quite small sixth and seventh year NEWT level classes; she can usually leave them to their own devices, although every so often one of them will try to trip her up with what they think is an extremely complex question about the brewing process. The fifth years are by far the worst. Amy tries to remember herself at fifteen, but surely she can’t have been this bad. She certainly never remembers acting up like this in class; she’d have been embarrassed at the thought. Sure, she was no perfect little angel, but at least she had some bloody respect! What is wrong with this generation? Is it a spoiled thing? Is that it? Are they used to their parents catering to them? Do they simply find her annoying, or the class useless? 

Her Thursday afternoon fifth years are the most aggravating. The class is overcrowded and consistently rowdy; they come in right from lunch, which means they’re already keyed up, or frantically trying to finish their homework, which they’ve put off until the last minute, as always. Amy usually tries to greet them with a smile, but at this point it’s the end of November and she’s got rather more important things on her mind than promoting a positive classroom atmosphere, so she’s already irritated by the time they’ve begun to take their seats, chattering away and dropping their bags all over the floor.

Amy waits until the clock strikes two, then clears her throat. The chatter continues. She clears it again, standing up from behind her desk. More chattering. She claps her hands together. Still whispering. “ALRIGHT,” she says loudly, and for the most part, it dies down. “Today I’ll be assigning new partners, so everyone, let’s stand up-,”

“No, Miss-,”

“Professor, I don’t want to-,”

“This isn’t fair, I just got to sit with Cindy-,”

“But Professor, you can’t put me with Tim-,”

“Miss, why am I always in the front?”

“If Gloria gets to sit by the storage room, I want to too-,”

“UP.” Amy all but shouts, and grumbling and moaning, they rise, more or less.

She exhales, then looks to her list of new seatmates. “We’ll start from the front left corner. Drew Ackles and Ethan Rose.”

“Do I really have to sit with Ackles?”

“Speak for yourself, Rosie Palms!”

“Daniel Shipman and Elizabeth Heddle.”

“We _just_ broke up, Professor!”

“Hannah Fox and Mildred Lodge.”

“Finally!”

“Charlotte Nestor and Victor Fiorelli.”

“You know he’s going to cheat off me.”

“You wish, Nestor.”

“Hugh Weaver and Tina Knoll.”

“Thank you, Miss!”

“Cool it, Hughie.”

“Shannon Kincaid and Lester Noon.”

Tense silence.

“Minerva McGonagall and Eileen Prince.”

Minerva’s hand shoots up, as expected. “Professor-,”

“James Hornby and Nicholas Cloud.”

“Professor!”

“Yes, Miss McGonagall?” Amy looks up, forcing a neutral expression. Minerva is a brilliant student. Insufferably brilliant, some might argue. Somehow even her essays come across as faintly patronizing. She’s so advanced that she gives off the general aura of being vaguely contemptuous of the entire schooling experience. If she were a muggle she would almost certainly have been moved up a year (or two). 

“Obviously I have nothing against Eileen,” Minerva says frankly, “but wouldn’t you agree, Professor, that Jennifer and I have been producing really exemplar work so far-,”

Jennifer Farrell isn’t your friend, Amy wants to say, she’s your sycophant, she associates with you because it makes her seem even smarter, but instead she says, “And I’m sure you’ll continue to produce exemplar work alongside Miss Prince.”

Eileen Prince has gone beet red, looking anywhere but at her classmates. Amy is faintly outraged on her behalf. Eileen’s incredibly clever, but consistently pushed aside and ignored because she’s not very witty or pretty or popular. 

“I just think I’d be better suited with someone more like Jennifer,” Minerva says stubbornly. “I mean, she’s got the best marks in this class, after me-,”

“And you have the best marks in this class after Eileen,” Amy snaps. 

There’s a dead silence. A few stunned and delighted looks are exchanged.

“Eileen’s top of the class?” Hughie blurts out.

Eileen looks as though she’d like to crawl under her table and stay there.

Minerva has gone very stiff and pale. She nods jerkily and lowers her hand, humiliated. Amy feels a brief flicker of sympathy, but then it’s gone. She hasn’t got the time to constantly placate every little ego in this room. Minerva knew exactly what she was getting herself into when she decided to throw a fit over her partner being changed. 

The class sullenly complies with her instructions, changing their seating into a pattern that she hopes will lead to less mischief and more work, and then she launches into the lesson for the day, a Strengthening Solution. It’s not the most complex of recipes, and to her satisfaction they do manage to keep their talking to a minimum, although maybe that’s because they’re all so annoyed with her and their new seats. Well, at least they’re annoyed and productive. That’s how she produced some of her best work as a student.

Minerva and Eileen barely exchange more than a word with each other, but to Amy’s relief the McGonagall girl doesn’t appear to be taking out her mortification on Eileen, who is bent studiously over her cauldron.

She’s sitting in the faculty lounge after class, feeling somewhat sullen herself, for all that the class went well, all things considered, when Sidney comes in to make a pot of tea. “Want some?” he asks, surveying her slouched figure on one of the beaten down sofas. “You look like you’ve just come out of a morgue.”

“That’s one way to describe it, yes,” Amy groans. She likes Sid Finch; he’s unassuming without being apathetic, clever without being condescending. He still cheers like a schoolboy at quidditch matches; it’s charming in its own way. “And yes to the tea as well, please. Thank Merlin that was my last class of the day, and I’ve only got four tomorrow.”

“Only four,” he whistles. “Well, at least there’s the match this weekend to look forward to. Hufflepuff versus Slytherin! Maybe you Puffs take this one, shut Nigel and June up for once, eh?”

Amy sighs. “I might skip it. I’ve got this journal article to review for MESP by next Wednesday, and the weather’s supposed to be brutal on Saturday.” She still enjoys watching matches, of course, but it doesn’t carry quite the same excitement it did when she was a player herself, and she knows Mae likely won’t bother to go, if Ravenclaw’s not playing. Not that they’d have much of a chance to talk anyways- now that Mae’s adjusted a bit more to being at school, the last thing she wants to do is make conversation with her professor mother in front of her new friends- or at least, what Amy hopes are her new friends. At the very least, it’s good she’s spending time around other kids, not skulking off by herself to poke at dead animals with a stick or talk to snakes. 

“I sincerely hope I didn’t just hear you speculate about skipping Hufflepuff’s first quidditch match of the year,” Iris says archly as she comes into the room, kicking off her heels and rooting around in one of the wardrobes for her sensible shoes. “Because that would be treason.”

Sidney snorts to himself as the kettle begins to whistle. “Hear that, Amy? Treason, she says.”

“Amy,” Iris says with mock- or maybe very real passion- laying a hand on her chest. “You, myself, Beery, and Dodie Hobbes are the only Hufflepuffs on staff. We’ve got to show our support. It’s one of the sacred duties of professorship.”

“That, and getting pissed at the Yule party,” Sid adds. “Iris takes both duties very seriously.”

“You’re an extremely belligerent man, Sidney Finch,” Iris sniffs, sitting down at the table. “Now make me a cuppa, please.”

“My pleasure,” he mutters under his breath.

Amy smiles wanly; Iris’ brow furrows. “Are you sure you’re not coming down with something? A cold, maybe? These nasty little buggers we teach are always spreading all sorts of infection- you’ve been so pale and tired all week, Amy.”

“And your solution is to drag her out in the freezing cold to a quidditch match?” Sidney rolls his eyes as he hands Amy a cup of tea. “Wait until Lucinda hears about this.”

“Don’t be such a little informant, Sid. The fresh air would do her some good! Give you something to look forward to beyond grading papers,” Iris smiles brightly at Amy. “We can go for dinner afterwards, all three of us, in the village. Ooh, or even pop down to Inverness, Amy, there’s this one bartender, I swear, he’s so handsome you’ll feel like you just wandered out of the Sahara-,”

Amy sips at her tea so to avoid having to respond to that, when there’s a tapping at the window. An owl bats its wings impatiently against the glass; Sidney sets down the kettle and strides over, throwing open the window and letting a blast of cold November air into the stuffy room. Iris winces in displeasure, but inquires, “Who’s it for? Must be important, it’s the middle of the day-,”

“It’s for you, Amy,” Sidney tosses the small, damp envelope in her direction; without thinking Amy catches it with her free hand, then sets down her cup of tea, tearing it open and feeling her pulse quicken as she reads it.

“Not MESP bothering you again, is it?” Iris asks dryly.

“No,” says Amy after a moment, fighting to keep a straight, composed face. “No, luckily it’s just an old friend who wants to meet up this weekend. I don’t think I’ll be able to make the match at all; it’s been a long time since we had the chance to catch up.”

Mae comes to find her on Friday night after dinner, as is her habit. Amy is trying to mentally brace herself for her meeting tomorrow, mostly by reading some nonsense romance novel she borrowed from the library. It involves devilishly handsome pirates and the ripping of bodices with rapiers and all sorts of things Mae shouldn’t have a clue about, so she hastily stows it away when Mae trudges into her office.

“Can we go somewhere tomorrow?” she demands, slumping into a chair. “I’m so bored.”

“You shouldn’t be,” says Amy. “You’ve got a Charms essay due on Monday.”

“Oh, that,” Mae sniffs. “I’ll be done with that by tomorrow night, tops. I could write half the class’s papers for them by Sunday, if I wanted.”

“You don’t want to,” Amy warns.

“Ob-vi-ously,” Mae huffs. “Not unless they’re paying me! C’mon, can’t we go see Aunt V? Or Teddy and Patsy’s baby?”

Patsy had her baby last week; they’re calling him Paul. Amy’s gotten a few pictures in the mail, but can’t bring herself to visit just yet; they’ll be able to tell something’s wrong, and it will remind her of her letters all over again. “Maybe next week, love. I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“I can’t wait until the break,” Mae huffs. “No one wants to go outside anymore because the weather’s so bad, and there’s nothing to do indoors!”

“Except go to class and do your homework, that is.”

“Spoilsport,” Mae accuses. “You never told me school would be so dull.” She props up her chin on her fist. “I already know what I want for Christmas.”

“And what would that be?” Amy hasn’t even been thinking about that. How can she? It seems so insignificant all of sudden. God knows what might happen between now and then.

“A familiar,” Mae declares. “I want a familiar. A cat. You can’t do hardly anything with a stupid owl, and cats live longer than toads, so if I’m not allowed to have a snake-,”

“You’re not.”

“Right, so I want a cat.” She pauses. “Marian has a cat. His name is Dorian.”

“His name is Dorian,” Amy exhales. 

“Yes, after the book! Her parents are massive fans of Oscar Wilde. Did you know he’s got this play, and the muggles wouldn’t let it be put on because it’s based off the Bible, and it’s about this girl, Salome, and she does this dance with seven veils-”

“I’m familiar with the story, Mae-,”

“And when she’s done, the king offers her a reward, and she asks for Iokanaan’s head,” Mae finishes in delight. “And Christine said her mother says that sort of writing is just _absolute filth_ , so I told her how you let me read Wuthering Heights last year-,”

“I should not have let you read Wuthering Heights last year,” Amy reflects, as Mae devolves into an impassioned breakdown of Heathcliff and Cathy’s twisted romance, complete with her personal feelings on the matter, which boil down to: “Someone should have just shot both of them.” 

When Amy finally shepherds her out of her office, Mae has talked herself out, to Amy’s relief, she kisses her on the head and sends her off to bed. One good thing about this is that Mae is usually so tired from a full day of school that she can’t even summon up the energy to complain about her curfew. 

Amy feels guilty, mostly. Feels that somehow her and Mae’s relationship has become shallow, less meaningful now that it’s not just the two of them anymore, and feels guilty for even thinking that, because this is how it always should have been. Mae is supposed to be less interested in doing things with her mother and supposed to be more interested in spending time with her friends. She’s supposed to questioning and challenging things- she’s growing up.

She waits until the quidditch match has already started at ten o’clock on Saturday to make her way down to the forest. The grass has gone brown and long, whisking at her legs, and the earth is muddy and slick underfoot. The wind ripples through the dark trees, and tosses loose leaves about. In short, it’s fitting for her mood. She’s not afraid, just wary, and she keeps her wand up the sleeve of her corduroy coat, all the same. 

Jaime Isola is sitting on a stump not far past the treeline, looking more than a little worse for the wear. One of his eyes is surrounded by a dark ring of purpled brown skin, and he has a nasty splitting open the knuckles of his left hand. His clothes look slightly too big on him, as if he had suddenly lost a good deal weight, and Isola was never all that husky to begin with. His bomber jacket is bloodstained and torn, his oxfords are filthy, and his trademark emerald green sunglasses are missing a lens. 

“How’d you get here?” she inquires, fighting back her panic. “You wouldn’t know where to apparate.”

“I know a guy,” he shrugs, then gives her an appraising once-over. “Look at you, huh? Taken to the scholarly life like a fish out of water?” He coughs raggedly, and Amy doesn’t like the sound of it. 

“Do you have a broken rib?”

“Oh, I got more than one,” he holds out a bruised and mottled hand to stop her from coming any closer. “Listen. I didn’t write you so you could play field medic out here with me, cariña. You know, when you came to me with that fuckin’ hunk of metal, here I am thinking, ah, spurned lover, maybe some kinda jewel heist gone wrong-,”

“Jaime, I can explain-,”

“You don’t have to explain shit,” he says through his teeth. “I got the full picture when all of sudden during my usual song-and-dance with the aurors, one Mister Tom Gaunt struts into the room.”

Her blood runs cold, and she instinctively takes a step back. If he’s been Imperiused-

He takes his wand out and tosses it up into the air; it levitates there, slowly spiraling, far, far above their heads. “You feel safer now? Calm down and listen. You’re a smart lady. This is not the time to lose it, you get me?”

“He comes in, starts asking me questions, and then nothing. I can’t-,” he gestures at his head, “remember anything past a certain point, ya know? Then I snap back to it, practically drooling a puddle on the table, and he’s gone and they’re giving me a glass of water. So I don’t know. I don’t know what he said, I don’t know what I told him.”

“Then I have to-,”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Jaime says tersely. “What you need to do is keep it together, right? Don’t try to- whatever you worked out in the first place, you stay on target with that. I don’t think he got what he wanted from me.”

Amy stiffens. “How do you know?”

“Because if he had what he needed, I don’t think I’d have three hit wizards on my trail for the past two weeks, and I don’t think I’d be talking to you right now,” he says sardonically. “Because you’d be in a cell on some trumped up charges like they tried to nail me with, or you’d be dead. But goddamn, Amy. You coulda told me I was fuckin’ with some government pig’s jewelry, yeah?”

“You were the only person I could think of to go to,” Amy says, trying to stay calm, like he said, and not give in to the tremendous pressure building in her chest, like a balloon about to pop. “I swear to you right now, if I thought there’d be any risk-,”

“Sometimes I forget how young you are,” he looks at her now not with bemusement or thinly veiled interest or patronizing scorn, but almost pityingly. It makes Amy feel very small and very young indeed. “There’s always a risk, cariña. I knew that when I took it on, and you knew it when you blasted through your savings to pay me, didn’t you?”

Amy swallows hard, then shoves her hands into her cold pockets. “You need to get out of the country.”

“Working on it,” he grunts. “Should be able to hitch a ride a few days from now, off the coast. Think I’ll spend some time in France. Supposed to be lovely this time of year.” He studies her for another moment, and his lined face softens briefly. “Hey. You’ve done me a lot of favors over the years. Don’t beat yourself up over me paying you back with this one. It’ll come around-,”

“This won’t,” Amy says. “I don’t think so. Not this time. I’ve been thinking this might… this might be it.” There is some small relief in admitting it aloud.

His soft looks turns into a faint scowl. “So what, you’re gonna roll over, belly up for that bastard? I thought you had more spunk in you than that. I’ve seen you go toe to toe with Hector Cavilla-,”

“A small time gangster and the leader of magical Britain are two very different things,” she says with a shrill edge.

“Less different than you’d think. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, and get a move on. This isn’t just about his fucking ring. You’ve got a kid.”

Amy’s head snaps back up to look at him. Jaime raises a dark, bristly eyebrow at her, matted with blood. “You’ve got a kid who needs you,” he repeats himself slowly. “So you’d better think of something. I don’t want to read some write-up in the paper about her not having a mother anymore.” He roots around in his pocket. “One last favor, from me to you.”

Amy cautiously holds out a hand, then narrows her eyes down at the small metal sticker pin deposited in it. It looks like the sort of thing you’d stick in the lapel of your coat, as though people might hand them out at campaign rallies, only this one doesn’t say TUFT ‘57 or GAUNT FOR MINISTER on it. It's engraved with KoW and is shaped in the outline of a medieval knight’s helm. 

“Got it off one of the bounty hunters tracking me,” he recounts gruffly. “We had a bit of a tussle.”

“K of W,” Amy mutters to herself. “Knights of… what?” She can’t think of any magical organization or society known as the Knights of anything, but then again, she hasn’t been back in the country for that long. 

“It was glowing red hot like a branding iron when we were having it out,” Jaime says. “Not anymore, though. Cold as stone now.”

“What if it’s some kind of tracker?” She’s tempted to chuck it into the underbrush. Or the lake.

“Nah,” he shakes his head. “I don’t think so. He was _not_ pleased when I got my hands on it. And I don’t think it’s eh… Ministry official,” he sneers. 

Amy holds it between two fingers, up to the pale forested light, squinting at it. The tiny helm stares dispassionately back at her. “Thanks. It’s a start, I suppose.”

Jaime Isola grins drolly, summons his floating wand back down into his hand, offers her a lazy two finger salute, and apparates away before she has the chance to say anything more, leaving Amy alone in the quiet depths of the forest, listening to the very faint roar of cheering from the quidditch pitch. She slips the pin into her coat pocket, and slowly begins the long uphill trek back to the castle. She has staff meeting next month. Seems as good a time as any to finally ask Dumbledore why he convinced Dippet to hire her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Sorry if this felt like a weird, slow chapter but I wanted to take some time to handle Amy's obvious fears and anxiety in the direct aftermath of Tom's election. She's a very capable and practical person but she's not devoid of fear or doubt and I wanted to address that she, as a normal human being, would be freaking out, albeit in private, over this turn of events. It was one thing when it was just speculation that Tom might actually win, but now that he's about to take on a position of tremendous power and influence, Amy is rightfully quite concerned.
> 
> 2\. Due to her practical nature, Amy feels like she needs to come to terms with the fact that, worst case scenario, something terrible might happen to her in the near future, leaving Mae without any family and a ton of questions. While she is confident her friends will step up to make sure Mae is taken care of in terms of housing and schooling, she knows it's very unfair of her to leave Mae with this massive bombshell, and is trying to figure out how to write some sort of explanation as to the truth of her daughter's origins. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.
> 
> 3\. Jaime Isola has escaped Ministry custody and is currently on the run, something he seems very much unfazed by. Sensibly speaking, Amy should have *never* gone out alone to meet him, as she belatedly realizes he could have very easily been Imperiused and setting up a trap for her. On the other hand, she does get some valuable info from this meeting- she now knows Tom is actively seeking out the ring, and she knows that at least one of the hit wizards pursuing Isola is somehow connected with a mysterious organization known as the Knights of W. 
> 
> 4\. What we learn at the end of this chapter is that, wherever the ring is right now, Amy brought it to Jaime Isola, a known cursebreaker and artificer, beforehand to do *something* with it or *something* to it.
> 
> 5\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com).


	13. Mae V

HOGWARTS, DECEMBER 1957

Mae wakes just after dawn on the morning of Friday, December 20th, 1957- the last day of classes before the holiday break begins, and the last day of autumn before the Winter Solstice- to see her first real snowfall. Ever. She sits bolt upright in bed, flung into waking by some unknown impulse- some greedy desire to be first, maybe, and silently fights with her covers until she’s scrambled out of bed and padded across the plush navy carpeting to the window to floor windows, shrouded in gossamer curtains. Mae slips behind one, letting it fall closed behind her, as though she were pretending to be a ghost, and peers out in delight at the deluge of snowfall swirling across the castle and the surrounding highlands, blanketing the dark ground in swathes of pristine white. 

She’s seen flurries and hail and icy sleet, seen frost most mornings and nights, fallen twice flat on her bum on icy cobblestones, but she’s never seen real snow, big fat flakes, perfect creations, never seen a landscape so transformed. The unearthly silence, the luminous paleness of the snow as the sun begins to rise is mesmerizing, and she stands there in stunned silence for minutes on end, her palms pressed flat against the glass, her breath misting in front of her, until it’s fogged up enough that she can write her name in the window pane- MAE WAS HERE. She adds a star beneath it, fingertips squeaking on the glass, then looks beyond her artwork to the snowfall once more in delight. 

Marian, Christine, and Valerie are all still asleep. They’d never believe her capable of willingly getting out of bed to see this. And now it’s all hers. This moment belongs to her and her alone. She hungrily drinks it in, and feels a brief flash of pity for Mum, who never had the chance to wake up early and see the snow come cascading down like this, stuck in the musty old Hufflepuff dorms in the basement. Mae doesn’t normally feel all that lucky to be in Ravenclaw- it’s more annoying that anything else, being surrounded by know-it-alls, but right now she does. She watches Hogsmeade transform into a village out of a snow globe far below, watches the black sheen of the lake become clouded with billowing mists, and watches the castle begin to look more like a giant gingerbread house than a medieval relic. 

For once she’s woken up early enough to actually take her shower in the mornings instead of at night, and she treats herself to a scalding one, sitting on the bed cross-legged and rather smug, flipping through a comic book she swiped from some Gryffindor when they were dumb enough to leave it lying out in the library. It’s about some wizard private eye; all the women are scantily clad and clutching cigarette holders between two manicured fingers, and the villains all have foreign accents or are missing an eye, for some reason. Mae quickly combs out her hair as she breezes through it; her bob has grown out since the summer and is past her chin; she’ll have to get it cut before she comes back to school. 

Her roommates gradually wake up, all shooting her looks of surprise to see her awake and seemingly ready for the day without any whining or moaning, and Mae amuses herself by watching Valerie fiddle with the barrette in her hair, while Marian and Christine carry on some whispered conversation in a corner. Those two are always whispering about things; Mae only bothers to eavesdrop on them every once in a while. It’s rarely anything interesting. They’re too boring. Mae didn’t know it was possible to like people but also find them boring until she went to school. She likes being around Marian and Christine most of the time- so long as Marian’s not poo-pooing everything and Christine isn’t having a sulk because of something her stupid brother did or said- but they’re not exactly people you can count on to do anything really fun with, not like Malcolm and Valerie, who are always up for a bit of mischief. Marian thinks it’s immature, and Christine’s a little snitch, everyone knows that.

That’s why she’s shocked when Marian finally says, in a normal tone, “Christine, just ask her,” and prods Christine towards Mae’s bed. Mae looks up in delight, rather pleased at the thought of Christine having to ask her anything- God, she hopes it’s a favor so she can hold this over Prissy Crissy’s head for the rest of the year- and reclines back onto her pillows like a lounging empress as Christine reluctantly comes over to her. 

“How can I help you?” Mae drawls, comic open across her lap.

Christine glances down at it and blanches. “Ugh, what are you reading?”

Mae looks down and realizes it’s a full panel spread of someone being eviscerated by a curse, chunks of gore flying everywhere. “Oh, that’s just Count Crimsoncloak- he’s the villain- see, Detective Houndstooth is fighting him, trying to save Lady Miranda, and look, that’s her hanging from that hook-,” 

Christine reaches over and flips it shut, cringing. “You read the most disgusting things. Your mother shouldn’t let you look at stuff like that. It’ll rot your brain.”

“That’s the most idiotic thing I ever heard,” Mae snorts. “Doesn’t your dad do this stuff for a living? Hunting people down and-,”

“Mae,” Marian snaps. “Not the time.”

“Sorry, Mother Dearest!” Mae pulls a face at her, then turns back to Christine. “Whaddya want?”

Christine looks around the room guiltily, from Valerie, pretending not to listen as she puts on her shoes to Marian, buttoning up her cardigan, back to Mae, who raises an eyebrow. “Can you help me break into Professor Dumbledore’s desk tomorrow night?” she blurts out all at once, closing her eyes in mortification. “I need to get my Remembrall back.”

“Your what?” Valerie asks in confusion. 

Mae is just as puzzled, but unwilling to show it, instead adopting a very stony, Mum-esque straight face.

Marian looks a little unsure of what a Remembrall is herself, but instead busies herself with adjusting her skirt.

“A Remembrall,” Christine recounts stiffly. “It looks like a big glass marble. It turns red when you forget something, to warn you. Like your umbrella, or your book bag-,”

“Or your dignity,” Mae suggests with a smirk, breaking out of her stoic look, then rolls her eyes at the glare Christine gives her. “Hey, you wanted my help.”

“I can’t believe you got something confiscated,” Valerie says in disbelief as she fixes her tie. “When did Dumbledore take it?”

“He didn’t take it from me, he took it from Mick because Mick was using it to cheat on a test,” Christine mutters, turning bright pink as though she were the one who’d been caught out. “Mick swiped it from me two weeks ago. I’ve been asking for it back for ages, but he kept giving me the run-around-,”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do after you steal something from someone,” Mae says under her breath.

“The point is,” Christine snaps, “I just really need it back, okay? I tried asking Dumbledore for it, but I think he thought Mick was putting me up to it-,”

“Was he?” Valerie snorts.

“And he said I could have it back after the break, but if I come home without it I’ll just-,” Christine cuts herself off, swallowing. “It’s just I need it back.”

There seems like quite a bit to delve into there, but to be perfectly honest, Mae was already in right from the get-go. Yes, this is probably a very stupid idea. Yes, it’s incredibly risky. If they get caught actively rummaging through a professor’s desk, it’s not just going to be a few points docked from Ravenclaw. But how can she resist? This is a heist in the making! The best Christmas gift she could have asked for. Besides, it’ll make for great blackmail material. Mae could care less about her reputation in school, but it’s practically all Christine Applewhite cares about.

She grins. “Say no more. Do you have a time?”

Christine does, as it turns out. Tomorrow night- the night before the vast majority of the students will depart from Hogwarts on their train back to London. There’s supposed to be a staff meeting on Saturday after dinner, from eight to nine o’clock at night. All they have to do is figure out a way to get into the locked Transfiguration classroom after eight and before nine, then get into Dumbledore’s desk, grab the Remembrall, and get out. Chances are, Mae reasons, he won’t even remember he had it in his desk in the first place, by the time break concludes two weeks from now. And even if he does, who would suspect innocent little Christine of stealing it back? If anything, Mick would be the one to blame, and Mae’s quite content with letting him go down for it. 

Besides, it’s just a classroom, not his office proper. It’s pretty unlikely, if you ask Mae, that he’s going to have it enchanted or warded to high hell. No professor in their right mind is going to keep anything actually expensive or dangerous in their classroom desk; Mum’s said as much. Worst case scenario, they do get caught or they can’t find it, so what? What’re they going to do, throw her and Christine in the dungeons for the length of the break? Doubtful. Mum would be horrified to hear about any of this, but Mum is also a professor herself now.

Obviously her loyalties are going to be torn. 

The last day of classes is just as frantic as anyone would imagine; most of the professors have completely given up on assigning them any real work, and just let them use the hour as a study hall, or have them do revision. Even Mum gives up on teaching them any new potions recipes and has them all help her clear out the storage room. Mae is quite used to getting dirty looks from her classmates in regards to Mum’s teaching by now, and shrugs it off as she sweeps around the classroom, every so often using the broom bristles to jab Malcolm in the back when he isn’t looking.

Their last class of the day is Transfiguration; typically, Dumbledore isn’t willing to let them just sit down and chat amongst themselves, so he has them continuing to practice transfiguring mice into snuffboxes. Mae is quite used to dealing with struggling mice by now, and gamely keeps ahold of hers, snickering as it tries to escape, whereas Malcolm keeps swearing under his breath at his, Marian is reluctant to even touch hers, Christine’s keeps turning into a furry mitten, and Valerie is arguing with Dumbledore about the morality of ‘experimenting’ on the poor rodents. 

Mae is glad for the distraction; while Dumbledore is patiently nodding his head and stroking his silvery beard as Valerie rambles on, she can scope out the desk from her seat in the second row of desks. As far as she can tell, there’s no actual magic being used on it during the schoolday; Dumbledore unlocks it with a simple key at the start of class, and locks it again at the end once he’s collected everyone’s snuffboxes, some of them still wriggling. Good. 

She waits until they’re walking back to the Ravenclaw Tower to bluntly ask Christine, “So why’d you think I’d be able to help you break into a professor’s desk?”

“Quiet,” Christine hisses in alarm, swatting at her arm, while Marian rolls her eyes. Valerie has run ahead to talk to Malcolm and Alec, as usual. Finally, as they turn into a more deserted corridor, Christine admits somewhat shamefacedly, “I heard you bragging about picking locks on the third day of classes.”

“Oh,” says Mae in surprise; she doesn’t even remember that herself. Well, it does sound like her. Of course she usually tends to leave out that she learned everything she knows about picking locks from her mum, just because it doesn’t really sound all that cool when people know your mother was in on it and even let you practice with her bobby pins, growing up. Mum always said it was a useful skill to know, and might help her get out of some tight spots someday. Of course, most of Mum’s own locks, like the one on that wardrobe in her office back in Gibraltar, usually proved impossible to pick without getting caught in the process.

“Well, I’m happy to help,” she continues smugly as they climb the stairs. “And I’m not even charging you for my services! That can be my act of goodwill this Yule.”

“This is your act of goodwill?” Marian asks in disbelief. 

“Obviously,” Mae doesn’t see the issue here. “I’m good at picking locks, and I will help Christine. What’s wrong with that?”

Even Christine laughs at that one.

All anyone can talk about at dinner that night are their plans for the break, which is a bit tiresome. Mae doesn’t really have plans. Mum says it’s not healthy to spend two weeks cooped up alone in the castle, so they’ll retreat to the cramped little stone cottage in Hogsmeade. She promised they could get a real tree this year, albeit a little one, so Mae is excited about that. Plus if she can find some old cardboard boxes she can make a sled and go down the hills behind the village. She doesn’t want to say that, though, because people would probably laugh at her and call her a baby. 

Mae used to think being a baby was when you played with dolls and cried a lot when your parents left you alone, but apparently it really means doing anything that’s not cool or hip, and going sledding with old cardboard boxes isn’t really cool or hip, it just means you’re poor. Mum would say that’s nonsense; poor is when you don’t have a house or food to eat or enough clothes to wear. Mae has all of that, so clearly she isn’t poor. She’s just not going to get a ton of presents for Christmas and they’re not going out to eat or to any fancy parties. 

Anyways, they’ll probably spend Christmas Day with Teddy and Patsy at their new house in Ipswich. Mae doesn’t even know where that is, except in the south, on the coast, but Mum says she’s seen pictures and it’s really nice and on the water, only they’re still rebuilding the docks from all the bombs that dropped during the war. She just hopes the baby doesn’t cry too much. She doesn’t feel like not getting any sleep because little Paul is having tummy troubles or something. 

Malcolm is going home to the farm with his sister, and all his aunts and uncles and cousins are coming over, which is a lot, because his father is the eldest of five brothers and sisters. Marian is going home to Reading to see her parents and her little brother, whose name is Sam. He’s only seven, apparently, and very annoying, but that’s not saying much, as Marian isn’t what Mae would call ‘overflowing with patience’. Valerie’s been really homesick for the past two months, which Mae knows because sometimes she cries in her sleep, which is pretty irritating, so she’s very happy to be going home to Exeter to see her parents and her sisters, even if she tries to play it cool. Christine doesn’t want to talk about going home, mostly because she’s worried about the Remembrall, and something about how her father is away for work at the moment.

It doesn’t snow again on Saturday, to Mae’s dismay, but there is a castle-wide snowball fight, mostly instigated by a few third years, and quickly spreading like wildfire. She spends most of the day dripped wet, tracking in slush and ice as she dashes in and out of doors again and again, dodging snowballs and skidding across the frozen ground, arms pinwheeling. Every so often a teacher comes along and looks as though they’re going to try to break it up, then gives up. Professor Penvenen, the Divination teacher, actively cheers them on from her office window, and Professor Finch and Mister Tittensor actually come out and play with them for a little while, dividing the gathered students into teams and making it like a real battle. 

At one point Minerva McGonagall storms out to yell at someone for hitting her in the back of the head with a snowball through a doorway, but when Malcolm lobs another one her way, she drops the indignant prefect act and turns into a regular big sister very quickly, chasing him around the courtyard until she catches him, and then rubbing snow in his face while he yelps and kicks. Alec Carstairs tries to drop some snow down Mae’s coat, but she evades him and then hits him right in the nose with a snowball from Valerie’s carefully stacked pile. Marian’s more concerned with making a perfect line of snow-angels across the ground, balancing precariously to avoid stepping on any of her art. 

At dinner Mae’s nose is sore and red and her cheeks feel a bit swollen from grinning in the cold for so long, but she’s very hungry; she gulps down her soup and even waves back at Mum when she catches her eye from the professor’s table. She’ll miss the food, anyways, even if she won’t miss the homework and all the rules. Christine doesn’t eat much; she looks like she might be sick, really, but that just works for their cover- she can tell everyone she went up to bed early to lie down. 

At eight o’clock sharp her and Christine set off for the fourth floor, where the Transfiguration classroom is located. Mae’s glad she’s not in her uniform; it’s pretty hard to sneak around in patent leather shoes, and her jumper is so dark a blue it almost looks black at night. Christine could have stood to dress a little more subtly; she’s wearing some stupid quilted swing skirt, for Merlin’s sake. She looks like she’s about to go to a sock hop, not breaking and entering. And she almost chickens out once they approach the door, even though it’s obvious that no one’s in the classroom. “Do you want your Remembrall back or not?” Mae whispers to her, then takes the first bobby pin out of her jean pocket. “Step back and let me work.”

She’ll give them this; these school locks are not easy to pick. Mae has to fully crouch down into a kneeling position and really concentrate for a good five minutes, which of course feels like an eternity with Christine fretting every second that they’re about to be caught. “Will you shut up?” Mae snarls at her at one point, and then, thinking that she ought to have just come by herself, finally gets the door unlocked. Hopefully they’ll be able to lock it again on their way out. They quickly slip inside the darkened classroom, shutting the heavy door behind them, and both light up their wands.

“Keep yours down,” Christine gestures to the window panel on the door. “In case someone sees-,”

“I know, I know!”

They don’t waste any time getting to the desk; there’s multiple drawers. “Which one?” Mae mouths, indicating them, and Christine freezes up. “Are you kidding me?!”

“Top left,” Christine snaps, then adds defensively, “See, I knew-,”

Mae huffs, then starts picking that lock. This one is even harder than the door; a good five minutes pass, and she breaks two bobby pins on it, before finally getting it open. “Nine minutes,” Christine informs her, as if she’s keeping score. Mae holds up the Remembrall triumphantly, plucked from the little collection of other confiscated items, then grins when she sees a pack of chewing gum buried at the very bottom, likely months old. She tosses the Remembrall to Christine, who gasps but manages to catch it, takes out the pack of gum, and shoves a stick in her mouth, chewing hard.

“Let’s go!” Christine is halfway to the door already.

“Give me a minute,” Mae says, rather proud of how unflustered she is. “I can’t lock this drawer like I could the door, and he’s gonna know right away if he goes to open it and it slides open.”

“So?”

Mae blows a small bubble, pops it, then takes the gum out of her mouth. “So I’m gonna jam it, so he thinks it’s still locked.” She slides the drawer most of the way shut, applies the gum to the underside so it will stick and catch, then closes it. “Voila.”

“That’s gross,” Christine says.

“Wow, you’re so very welcome, Christine-,”

“Okay, thank you!” Christine is putting the Remembrall carefully away in her skirt pocket. “I mean it. This was… well, you didn’t have to help me, and you did.”

Mae preens a little, then asks, “So what was so important about it, anyways? Are they really that expensive that you’d get in trouble for losing it?” She might as well ask now, in the darkness and privacy of the classroom. Christine hates answering questions, or anything that might make her look stupid or embarrassed, in front of other people. 

“No,” Christine admits after a moment. “They’re not really expensive, it’s just- my dad got it for me, and I haven’t seen him since July-,”

“Since July?”

“He’s been really busy with work,” Christine snaps. “You wouldn’t understand, you’re always around your mum. His job is very important. He helps catch criminals. But he’s always home for Christmas- almost always- and if he found out I didn’t have it anymore, he’d be really disappointed.”

“But it’s not your fault Mick got it taken away,” Mae points out, confused. 

“Mick and him are really close,” Christine folds her arms across her stomach. “It’s not the same. He’d say I should have been more careful with it in the first place.”

“Your dad sounds like a jerk,” Mae sniffs. “That’s not fair, he can’t have different rules for you and your brother-,”

“What would you know about it?” Christine sounds really, seriously upset, to her shock. “You don’t even have a dad! It’s just you and your mum, and everyone knows she lets you run wild because she’s-,” She cuts herself off, which is a good thing, because if she’d finished that sentence Mae would have had to hit her, or at least try to jinx her.

Her cheeks burn all the same. “I do too have a dad,” Mae spits furiously. “You- you are such a little brat- see if I ever do anything nice for you again, Christine Applewhite- I do have a dad, and he was a real hero, not a bloody hit wizard, he was a soldier in the war-,” she moves to show Christine the dog tags, but there’s suddenly distant voices in the corridor, and they both freeze. 

Christine dashes over to the door to peek out. 

“Dumbledore’s coming back here with your mum!” she whispers, whirling back around, face white with terror in the dark.

“Shit,” Mae says, and then rushes forward and locks the door.

“What’re you doing-,”

“They can’t know we’re in here!” She looks frantically over to the windows, but they’re too far up to jump down into the snow without getting seriously hurt. Even she’s not reckless enough to try that. She runs around the desk and tries the door leading back into Dumbledore’s private office and rooms, but that’s locked too, of course. Shit. 

“Come here!” To her surprise, Christine grabs her hand and all but drags her down the lines of desks to the back of the room. She flings open a closet door that Mae had completely forgotten about in her panic, and they both hurry inside, closing it nearly all the way and extinguishing their wands, waiting breathlessly. Maybe they’re just passing by.

No such luck. The voices get a little louder, and then the classroom door unlocks and opens. Dumbledore murmurs something and the torches on the walls blaze to life, as does the hearth in the back of the room. Christine backs up further into the closet, but Mae stays crouched just behind the door, listening intently. Mum shuts the classroom door behind them, and sighs.

“I do apologize for marching you across the castle so late in the day, Professor Benson,” Dumbledore says in that same old mild-as-spring voice of his, all thoughtful and reflective and bloody annoying, if you ask Mae. “But I felt that the faculty lounge was perhaps not the wisest place to have this conversation.”

What conversation? What don’t they want the other professors to know about? Mae’s interest overrides her nerves. She keeps listening.

“I’m not trying to pry,” Mum says, and her voice is different than usual; hesitant, guarded. “But I felt that… given recent events, I’m sure you understand why I might be…”

“Concerned?” Dumbledore sounds almost bemused, and a little sorry, at the same time. “You would not be alone in that. Many of us are. Professor Dippet, of course, chooses to see the benefits of this situation for the school- the Gaunt government has promised to do a thorough investigation of the educational system. Armando feels this is sorely needed, and may lessen the stranglehold the Board of Governors has often kept on Hogwarts. I am less convinced. And I suspect, so are you.”

Why would they be talking about Tom Gaunt? Mae is distantly aware that he’s supposed to get take office tonight, but-

“I was more so wondering about Professor Slughorn’s whereabouts,” Mum says after a moment of tense silence. “I… well, he was always so fond of Tom, and it just seems unusual that he wouldn’t want to be here to… celebrate one of his favorite students’ victories-,”

Wait, what? Since when does Mum refer to Tom Gaunt, the politician, as just ‘Tom’? She almost sounds like she knows him. Or knew him. But Mae asked her, and Mum said they never really knew each other at school, that they kept different circles-

“Horace was incredibly fond of Tom,” Dumbledore agrees. “He saw great potential in him. As did many of us. Yourself included, I’m sure. He was an extraordinarily gifted young man. And something of a natural leader amongst his fellow students.”

“People wanted to make him happy,” Mum agrees, to Mae’s further shock, and then adds, “Even professors. What I’m trying to say, is…,” she exhales. “Do you think his sudden retirement had anything at all to do with the election? With Tom… coming into power?”

Dumbledore says nothing for a moment, then asks quietly, “Are you concerned that Horace may not have retired entirely willingly?”

“Yes,” Mum says flatly. “And I think you are too, sir. Because you have to admit that offering me the job- that’s not something most people would have predicted the school doing, and if there’s some reason why Tom might not want Slughorn teaching here-,”

“Oh, if anything, I am very certain Tom did in fact want Horace Slughorn teaching here for years to come,” Dumbledore says with an almost bitter edge. “Which may have contributed to Horace’s rather hasty exit from the position. I doubt he wanted to be anywhere within range of Tom’s potential… influence after displeasing him so.”

“The Minister has no direct control over Hogwarts. The Ministry doesn’t even choose the Headmaster,” Mum says, and there is something like genuine fear in her voice, for an instant, that makes the hair on the back of Mae’s neck stand up straight.

“Thankfully, that is correct,” Dumbledore replies. “However, Tom has quite a good deal of control over many other spheres… Horace may not have been part of the Ministry, but he was, for a brief time, a Knight of Walpurgis, something he undertook out of flattery, and quickly, I believe, came to regret.” He pauses. “This conversation would be better served in my office, Professor Benson.”

Mum says nothing for a long moment, then murmurs an agreement. They move into the other room, that door opening and shutting behind them as well. One by one, the torches in the classroom flicker out. Slowly, oh so slowly, Mae pushes open the closet door, and her and Christine all but crawl through the desks, over to the classroom door, and then scurry back out into the hall, panting and shaking with nerves. 

They sprint back to the Ravenclaw Tower, whereupon the eagle knocker snidely inquires, “I fill up a room, yet take up no space. What am I?”

“Buzz off and let us in,” Mae barks at the knocker, slamming her palm against the door in frustration.

“Light,” Christine responds quickly, and they hurry inside.

“Could you have come in any more loudly?” an older student snaps at them; a group of them are crowded around a wireless radio, listening intently. “Minister Gaunt’s giving his first speech!”

Mae makes an obscene hand gesture, although her hands are shaking a little. Christine grabs her by the arm and leads the way up to their dormitory. They stop in the deserted, narrow stairwell, ignoring the frigid draft. “What was that about?” Christine demands. “What- what were they talking about?”

“How should I know?” Mae exclaims. “She didn’t- I didn’t even know my mum even knew the Minister-,”

“Well, clearly she does! This is mad! Your mother is- she’s conspiring with Dumbledore against Minister Gaunt!”

“She’s not conspiring, it’s not against the law to talk about the Ministry-,”

“She was making him out like some kind of villain,” Christine says breathlessly. “That’s- he’s a hero, my dad says. He’s going to do loads of good things for us. To protect us from war, and- and dark wizards like Grindelwald, and from muggles trying to blow us up with bombs-,”

“Muggles want to blow each other up, not witches! You don’t even know Minister Gaunt,” Mae all but sneers. “Don’t be such an arse kisser-,”

“You almost got us caught!”

“No, you almost got us caught!” Mae resists the urge to shove her down the stairs. She’d probably break her neck, and her glasses. “Going on about your stupid dad- look, my mum wouldn’t have even been talking about any of that if she wasn’t worried about something.”

“Well, maybe she’s done something wrong!”

“She’s a healer!”

“Not anymore!”

“Well, I’m glad you got your stupid little ball back, so you don’t disappoint Daddy,” Mae says spitefully. “Good luck with that, Christine! I hope he doesn’t even come home for Christmas!”

“You’re mean,” Christine sounds like she might cry now. Good. “You can’t say that- his work is really dangerous, he’s tracking a murderer!”

“Yeah, who?”

Christine hesitates, as if knowing she shouldn’t say anymore, then blurts out, “Some Spaniard named Isola. He’s already killed one hit wizard, and that could have been my dad! You’re so stupid- you don’t even understand how dangerous the world is! Instead you’d rather live in la-la land with your traitor mother-,”

Mae doesn’t even hear that, having not heard anything past ‘Isola’. How common a surname is that, she wonders? She thinks of Jaime Isola and his cocky grin and how lots of times he’d come into the clinic all beaten up or with blood all over his shirt that wasn’t really his. The blood, not the shirt. He’s a criminal, sure, but she’d never ever heard about him really killing anyone, never mind a hit wizard. Christine storms past her, up the stairs, and Mae leans against the wooden banister, just thinking, speechless.

She doesn’t bother seeing her friends off at the station on Sunday morning; she’s too busy helping Mum bring down some stuff from the castle to the cottage, and when they’re done Mae willingly runs over to the window to let in the impatient owl trying to drop off their mail. Mum has some fancy letter from MESP and a small package from France; Mae slides them across the table to her while she flips through the Daily Prophet until she gets to the obituaries section.

There she scans the rows and rows of death notices until she comes upon _CYRIL TAYLOR, HIT WIZARD, DIES AT 46. Cyril Taylor, a member of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement since 1931, and a Ministry of Magic hit wizard since 1949, was killed last Tuesday in the line of duty while pursuing a wanted criminal. His body was found in a building site in Canterbury. Mister Taylor is survived by his loving wife, Grace, and their three children…_

“Mae, why are you reading the obituaries?” Mum has finally looked up from the letter from MESP, which really looks more like an invitation. She seems puzzled but not alarmed or suspicious, to Mae’s relief.

Mae shuffles the paper back over to the cover. “Just curious. Wanted to see if there were any gory ones.”

Mum smiles slightly, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Mae studies her with renewed skepticism. She definitely lied about not knowing Tom Gaunt. Mae was so sure she’d always know when she was lying. What else has she lied about? Should she be impressed, or angry? “What’s that?” she asks instead, jabbing a finger at the red letter.

“MESP is holding their annual New Year’s charity gala,” Mum says.

“Can we go?” Mae asks immediately.

“It’s not for children, Mae.”

“Is it for poor people, then?”

“They don’t usually invite the poor to the parties they hold for them.” Mum’s mouth twitches slightly.

“Are you going?” Mae stares her down from across the kitchen table. Outside, the wind picks up, rattling through the bare trees in the small garden out back. 

Mum doesn’t laugh and say ‘No, of course not’ or ‘Don’t be ridiculous, we always spend New Years together, just me and you, Mae-flower’. Instead she says lightly, “We’ll see. It’s been years since I went to a good party.”

“I bet,” Mae mutters, and gets up from the table. “I’m going upstairs. I’ve got some comics to finish. When are we getting our tree?”

“Tomorrow, love.” Mum is already distracted with her package from France, prodding at it with her wand. “We could go out and buy some decorations for it tonight; we didn’t bring very many with us. How does that sound?”

Ordinarily Mae would jump at the chance to go out anywhere, especially at Christmas time. Instead she says tightly, “We’ll see!” and stalks upstairs, not sure if she’s angry, afraid, or a little bit of both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I know most people were probably expecting another Amy chapter but I thought this would be more fun, since we haven't heard from Mae or her friends (frenemies?) in a while. I also thought it'd be a good way to heighten the tension while still progressing the plot; Mae has gone from cheerfully oblivious of anything wrong to now actively suspicious of her mother and what her mother has told her regarding her past. Next chapter will most likely be from Amy's POV, as weird as it will be to have Christmas in May!
> 
> 2\. I try to keep a balance in Mae's chapters between her being precocious and pretty clever and her also still being a little kid at heart. She likes comic books and Christmas and sledding and snowball fights. I also wanted to show some more of her dynamics with her friends while emphasizing how different she is from Amy- close friendships don't come as easily to Mae as they did to her mother. She's much more of a loner and while she enjoys being around other people, she's not necessarily all that invested in their personal lives or interests. 
> 
> 3\. Christine Applewhite, as we're discovering, doesn't necessarily have the most happy home life. In the war for parental attention between her and her older brother, Mick usually wins. She idolizes her father- somewhat similar to how Mae thinks (or thought) that Amy can do no wrong- and is desperate for his affection and approval, which is heightened by the fact that he's often away from home for weeks if not months on end. 
> 
> 4\. In canon we really don't learn much about Dumbledore until around Book Six. Obviously this is not going to be a seven-book series. Thank God. But I didn't want to completely 'unveil' Dumbledore as a character right off the bat. Amy trusts that he's going to firmly oppose Tom. She doesn't trust much else from him. In Mae's mind, he's just another doddering and eccentric professor, although she clearly witnesses another more calculating side of both him and her mother in this chapter.
> 
> 5\. Mae's shock and unease in this chapter is not so much that she believes her mother to be this secret villain, but the realization that Amy may not have been strictly honest with her all these years. Between realizing that Amy has lied to her at least once about her school days, and realizing that a man she knew to be friendly with her mother is now a wanted murderer, that's a lot for an 11 year old to take in. I think it's always difficult as a child to realize that your parents may have more than one 'persona' and who they are at work or with other people may not the person they are around you.
> 
> 6\. Next chapter will be the last chapter set in 1957 for this fic. There will be time skips in this fic and it will not be a strict play-by-play of Mae's Hogwarts years so I don't want anyone to be caught off guard if we begin to accelerate the pacing. It's not all going to be lighthearted Hogwarts hijinks.
> 
> 7\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com).


	14. Amy VI

HOGSMEADE, DECEMBER 1957

Amy grits her teeth, and swings the axe. There’s a satisfying creak of wood, and she steps back as the fir tree, which is no taller than her, slumps over, defeated. She hands the small axe off to Mae, who brightens visibly. “Finish her off, yeah?” Amy steps back, ready to intercede to prevent any unnecessary amputations if needed, as Mae closes in and brings the axe down again with a grunt, then another, bracing one boot on the fir’s slim trunk. Finally, it’s fully cut down, and Amy walks around, snow crunching underfoot, inspecting. 

“Alright, I’ll take the base, you take the top,” she says, and with some effort, manages to haul up the small fir tree as Mae scrambles underneath the branches to hold up the other end, groaning dramatically.

“Can’t we just levitate it back?”

“Basic Charms,” Amy snorts. “One can only effectively levitate what they can hold with their own physical strength. If I tried a levitation charm on this, we’d get maybe a dozen yards before I had to set it down again. Come on, work those muscles, Mae.”

“I haven’t got any!”

“Then this is building some,” Amy decides. “And character.”

“It builds character to lug trees out of the woods?” Mae retorts waspishly as they begin to make their way out of the edge of the Forbidden Forest. “Yeah, right!”

“How do you think I became such a wonderful person?” Amy replies breathlessly as they pick up the pace, breaking free of the dark treeline. It’s late afternoon and the sun is already starting to lower itself towards the hills, as though bowed by the weight of the woolly grey clouds surrounding it. She’s just relieved it’s not colder. The snow has melted down to no more than an inch or two, which certainly makes this easier. Next time they’ll have to bring some kind of wagon or sled. Or a broom. “Years of mopping floors, scrubbing toilets, and lugging heavy things around.”

“That’s not how it works, Mum,” Mae informs her in the classic tone of an eleven year old deeply disturbed by their mother’s ignorance. “Marian’s family volunteers at a homeless shelter on Christmas Day. Isn’t that supposed to build character?”

“I’m sure it does. Marian has a lovely character. She doesn’t make trouble in my class and she turns in all her assignments on time,” Amy snorts, slowing as they approach the first incline. “Careful, now-,”

Mae huffs, not really pausing at all, even as the fir continues to shed dark green needles across the snow and slush. “Mae, don’t jostle it so!”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Mae calls back in a sing-song voice, only to slip and almost lose her footing. Amy bites back a laugh, then pretends she didn’t hear the cursing. 

Luckily, they only need to stop twice to catch their breath on the way into the village. It’s easier going once they reach the cobblestoned streets and can pick up the pace, although it’s still quite slippery. Hogsmeade doesn’t really have any street cleaners. What it does have an abundance of is holiday decorations; there are wreaths on nearly every door, candles in the windows, and red ribbons wound around the lamp posts. It does look rather picturesque, Amy has to admit. She’s not used to seeing it like this, since she went home nearly every winter break. 

But it’s nice to share it with Mae. She’s almost glad for the distraction of the holiday season. It means she’s busy all day making sure Mae’s entertained and not getting into trouble, and she doesn’t have much time to consider… everything else that is not nearly so bright and cheery and safe. She’s trying to take it one day at a time. Surely the worst thing she could do would be anything rash. Both Jaime Isola and Albus Dumbledore, different as night and day, would agree on that. Yes, things are looking pretty shite. But that doesn’t mean she can run around like a chicken with her head cut off. 

They’ve just reached their street when they hear a distant call, and Mae whines in annoyance as Amy sets down the tree so she can see who’s approaching them. It’s Arthur Norbrook; he seems genuinely entertained by their current state, red-faced and covered in fir needles. He comes hurrying over to them, barely containing his chuckles, and asks right away if they need help getting that in the house.

“We’re fine, thank you,” Amy begins to say, but Mae chirps, “Yes, please!” and flashes her most winning smile. 

Norbrook’s not a particularly bulky man; if anything he’s the same height as his wife, but he’s still stronger than both of them, and lifts the tree up over one shoulder with ease as they walk on either side of him. “Bit late to be picking one out, isn’t it?” he asks as they near the front stoop; Amy dashes ahead to unlock the door for him, while Mae tuts in agreement with him.

“Better late than never, I say,” Amy says, as she finally gets the door open; she steps back, holding it ajar so he can maneuver into the house, then sighs as Mae cuts in front. “Mae, really, let the poor man in-,”

“That’s quite alright,” Arthur walks the tree into the cramped foyer, past the stairwell, and into the tiny sitting room, propping it up against the old fireplace. Amy realizes with an uneasy edge that this is the first time she’s ever had anyone in here besides herself and Mae. It’s not that she’s afraid of June Carmody’s husband, or even really concerned, it’s just… It would be so easy for anyone to just walk right in. Even with the doors and windows locked. She needs to start setting up some proper wards, not this haphazard network of security charms she’s got going at the moment. It’s too… they’re right out in the open here. She wonders if their address is public records. Most likely. It was on her re-entry forms, all of them. 

God, she might as well have mailed Tom a map of Hogsmeade, circled the cottage in red, and written, “Come say hello!” on the back. 

But when Arthur Norbook turns to look at her, she detects no ulterior motives beyond a faint appreciation for the simple but cozy decor. “Very nice place,” he says, brushing some needles off his coat. “Merlin, ours is a mess compared to yours- your mum likes to keep things spic and span, huh Mae?”

“She’s got an obsession,” Mae declares darkly, flopping onto the sofa, still in her damp jacket.

Amy shoots her a dirty look, then steps towards the kitchen. “Thank you so much, Mr. Norbook-,”

“Art,” he says, almost sheepishly. “You and June are colleagues now, feels only fair-,”

“Can I get you something to drink?” Amy rummages through the cabinet, but he’s already retreating towards the door. 

“No,” he says distantly, “thank you, Amy. I’ll leave you two to your decorating. June and I usually ring in the New Year at the Hog’s Head, if you’re around. Might have to find a sitter for this one, though,” he shoots Mae a wry smile.

“I don’t need a sitter,” Mae sits up straight, indignant. “I’m not a child-,”

“Quiet, child,” Amy says, as she waves him out. Fortunately, he closes the front door behind himself. She sighs as she sets two mugs on the counter. “Come show me how much milk you want in your hot chocolate.”

They get the small box of ornaments and tinsel down from the back of the pantry and get to work shortly thereafter; Mae seems happy enough to dart about, inspecting the tree from every angle, which relieves Amy. Mae’s been a bit out of sorts since school ended for the break; testy and sullen, spending more time cooped up in her room with her books and comics than usual, blasting the radio or her records on the phonograph. Amy hopes it’s just the dull shock of being away from her peers; it can’t be easy to go home to just the two of them, after three months of being surrounded by kids her own age.

The tree is so small that it doesn’t take more than an hour to properly decorate, although Amy thinks they could have done with a little less tinsel. Mae balances precariously on an armchair to set the glittery gold star on top; it looks so cheap and childish that Amy almost laughs- there’s something oddly wonderful about this shoddy little tree that’s nearly lost a third of its needles already, heaped with worn down decorations from second hand shops and yard sales, sitting slightly crooked in the makeshift stand in the corner by the window. It doesn’t even have lights on it. But Mae stands proudly in front of it like Michelangelo next to David while Amy snaps a photograph, smirking.

Afterwards, Mae rushes upstairs to listen to some radio horror show she enjoys, and Amy sits and looks at the tree for a little longer, than goes into the kitchen to clean up. Hastily tucked away in one of the drawers is the package she got the other day from France; Jaime found the time to buy or steal a cheap postcard and scrawl a message to her on the back: ¡FELIZ NAVIDAD! - JOYEUX NOËL! - HAPPY CHRISTMAS! - Είναι όλα ελληνικά για μένα! Amy doesn’t read Greek, so she’s got no idea what the last bit says, but suspects it’s some kind of stupid joke. 

That would have been fine enough; she recognizes his handwriting, so at least she knows he’s alive, but he also happened to tape a small, narrow fragment of jagged wood to the card. Amy had puzzled over it in silence for a while before finally realizing it was part of someone’s wand. Apparently he was in high enough spirits to have taken a trophy off one of the hit wizards before making his getaway. Happy Christmas indeed. He’s probably holed up in someone’s basement, using far more whiskey than is strictly necessary to clean his wounds. 

She didn’t tell Dumbledore about that. In fact, she’s almost proud of herself; Dumbledore can be disarming; he’s got a kindly face despite those grim blue eyes, and it was easy, once the lull of conversation began, to lean towards some sort of guilty confession, as though she’d suddenly become a Catholic and needed to be absolved. But she’d managed to reel it back in, and had only given and received the bare minimum; he was sympathetic, of course, but the man’s not what anyone might call open-handed when it comes to clueing people in. 

“I recommended you for the position,” he’d said, while she tried to tear her gaze away from the phoenix nesting in a gaudy cage in the corner of his spacious office- early twice as large as her own, really, how much was Dippet paying him- “in part because I knew you’d become a highly skilled healer and talented potioneer, and in part because I felt it necessary to bring on board a staff member who I knew might very well share my… concerns about Tom.”

She’d been waiting all the while for the other shoe to drop, for him to take off those stupid glasses and lower his voice, and say, ‘See here, Miss Benson, I know exactly where that daughter of yours came from’, but he never had. Far too blunt for the likes of Dumbledore, of course. He must suspect. He must. He’d recommended her, all but sponsored her return to Britain. He had to know. They both had to know. 

“Your concerns being that he’s… started this order,” Amy had found it difficult to keep the derision from her tone, “and now he’s won the election? And you think Slughorn ran, rather than face him?”

“The Knights of Walpurgis are a rather recent addition to the long list of fraternal and sororal orders that populate the wizarding world,” Dumbledore had said soberly. “I’m sure you’re aware of our origins rooted in covens. Many of these organizations serve to bring back that sense of community and mutual loyalty to one another… for these reasons, they have always been exceptionally popular among the oldest families. 

“Rather Slytherin thing to do,” Amy had surmised. “Start a top secret club.”

“I’m sure Tom was in no small part inspired by his years in Slughorn’s small cohort of talented or otherwise fortunate students,” Dumbledore had said with perhaps a slight edge of dry sarcasm. “But you will not find his name on any official records of the Knights. No. He has more than one proxy all too eager to do the dull paperwork for him.”

“So it’s… legal?” Amy had felt her brow furrow. “I mean, have they done anything wrong, really, or just…” 

“There’s been an errant incident or two within the past few years,” Dumbledore had said calmly. “The odd murder or attack on a prominent muggleborn witch or wizard, or act of arson against a family newly wed into a muggle line. Or break-in at a wealthy estate. I’m afraid we’ve yet to see any arrests made in any of those cases, and I very much doubt we will in the future, given Tom’s current position. For all official purposes, the Knights of Walpurgis purport to be a social and charitable fraternal order-,”

“Of course,” Amy had muttered. “He always liked his boys’ clubs.”

“With the express purpose of safeguarding magical tradition and culture against the encroachment of the muggle world upon our own,” Dumbledore had finished as though she hadn’t interrupted at all. “Conveniently vague, isn’t it?”

Amy had looked at him then, really looked at him; he did not seem to have aged all that much from when she first saw him as a little girl, although his hair is nearly entirely grey now. There is still the odd trace of copper in his beard, which is even longer than it was when she was a student. He looks like the eccentric cousin of Father Christmas, still. That old sense of foreboding has never left her when looking at him, though. 

“And you think he pressured Slughorn into joining up?”

“Pressured? No. Suggested and insinuated and otherwise made an appealing case for it, of course. I have considered Horace a friend for years now, but his intelligence is frequently in competition with his pride and ego. Myself and a few others among the staff urged caution, but he was only too happy to join at the time. Tom’s name had just come into circulation as a possible future candidate for Minister. Horace was thrilled for him; he’d always said he’d excel in government.”

Dumbledore had sighed quietly. “Less than six months later, he made it known to me that the Knights were not what he’d anticipated upon his joining. He was loathe to reveal any details- perhaps out of fear of incriminating himself as well- but he left the distinct impression that he’d been taken in, and was now desperately discomforted by what he’d been exposed to once within.”

Amy hadn’t been able to summon up all that much sympathy. “So he turned tail and ran for the hills.”

“I believe he made one last appeal to Tom before doing so- perhaps urging him to keep his burgeoning order in line, or publicly disavow any connection to them... But of course, Tom has no public connection to them; not one that any of us might readily prove.”

What could she do then, but take out the bloody pin? To her relief, he hadn’t launched into an interrogation over how she’d gotten it, and had accepted her flat statement that it’d come from a hit wizard with no more than a slight nod. Then- “It’s concerning,” Dumbldore had admitted, leaning back in his chair, “but I’m afraid the presence of the pin alone and word of mouth does not prove anything untoward about our Minister.” He’d steepled his long fingers together.

Amy had felt a headache coming on. “Then what are we supposed to do? Just wait for something horrible to happen? He’s- he’s clearly corrupt-,”

“His supporters will argue the same can be said of most of our previous Ministers-,”

“He’s started a- a bloody purist cult-,”

“Which we’ve little to no proof of-,”

 _He wants me dead_ , she’d almost snapped then, _will that get you a little frazzled, Professor_ , but she’d held her tongue. She could have brought up the ring. Should have, maybe. Should have started from the very beginning. But what was she going to say? _‘I know about a mass-murder committed in the summer of 1944, only I didn’t say anything because I needed to leverage it for blackmail material leading up to my plot to drug said murderer with a highly controlled sedative? Oh, by and by, I conceived a child with him along the way, who happens to be in your first year Transfiguration class, but you probably already knew that bit! I also happen to be in possession of what may or may not be an incredibly dangerous magical heirloom dating back to the time of Slytherin himself! Just thought I’d let you know!’_

Instead she’d said, “Do you know any other members of the Knights?”

Dumbledore had paused for a moment, as if considering telling her this or not, then said, “Several. Antony Nott would be one of them. Gilbert Rosier, another. Charles Burke. There are rumors Edgar Prince is angling for admission.” He’d stopped then. “I’d estimate there are at least fifty members, likely more, depending on how stringent their requirements for acceptance are.”

Amy doesn’t want to think about what sort of initiation that might entail. And she’d been too distracted by the mention of Nott. “Antony Nott? Are you sure? He- he interviewed me for MESP.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore had, without looking away from her, rooted through a drawer in his desk and produced a red invitation, something she at that exact moment hadn’t been familiar with, but what she would herself receive in the mail the very next day. “MESP prides itself on being a rather egalitarian organization, but I think we both are well aware of who is afforded certain privileges and who is not.”

Now, as she listens to the faint sounds of Mae’s radio from the floor above, she reads over the invitation one more time, skimming in her haste. Hereby… cordially invited to… partake in a night of celebration… as we close out the old year… and ring in the new… Cohosted by the Prince and Nott Families at Prince House, County Longford, Ireland. 

“Are you attending, sir?” she’d asked Dumbledore, the day before, glancing at his own invitation.

He’d almost laughed. “Myself? No. I prefer to ring in the new year at our very own Hog’s Head Inn. The bartender and the locals are all the company I require.”

Well, she certainly had not, in that moment, said to Albus Dumbledore, “You know what? I’ll try to scrounge up an invitation myself and pop on by to the Princes’ to try to collect some dirt on the Knights of Walpurgis?” Had she thought about it? Yes. Had she really thought about it when she promptly received an invitation herself? Yes.

Did she actually intend to follow through on that, frankly, reckless and idiotic idea?

Could she brew a perfect batch of Veritaserum between now and December 31st?

On Christmas Eve she takes Mae sledding with some old cardboard boxes up in the hills behind the village, only breaking for lunch and retiring at five o’clock when it’s growing too dark to see. Amy has this sense of greedily lapping it up, these fleeting childhood moments. Next year Mae will be twelve, and she might not be content to hang around with her mother during the holidays. She might want to visit her friends, or go out sight-seeing, or any number of normal but terrifying notions of teenage independence. That she can still keep Mae entertained, just the two of them, means something precious to her. 

So much so that after they both pass out in the sitting room, slumped across the sofa and in the armchair, respectively, Amy forces herself to rouse at half past six and puts her cooking skills to the test. Mae’s right; she’s always preferred to bake- they say cooking is an art, baking a science, and while Amy hasn’t drawn anything in a very long time, she’d argue she’s been forced to keep herself very well versed in the sciences… albeit unrecognized ones by the muggle world. 

Anyways, she tries her hand at some roast potatoes and bacon rolls, throws in some carrots and peas, and experiments with some bread sauce, even if they haven’t got any turkey or really any meat at all to go with it- she doubts Mae wants leftover chicken for Christmas Eve dinner. Iris insisted she take some leftover trifle she’d made for the staff meeting on Saturday, and Amy’s glad she took it, because otherwise they’d be left with… store bought biscuits and chocolate pudding for desert. When Mae finally gets up an hour and a half late, Amy is quite proud of herself, prodding at the potatoes with a fork to make sure they’re not too mushy.

Mae stares at her in bleary befuddlement, rubbing at her eyes. “I thought we were going to go down to the pub for dinner. Or have that casserole.”

“I thought this would be more fun,” Amy says, with a tenuous grown up smile, the same smile she’s plastered on at every birthday party and holiday event, determined to reassure Mae that this was fine, everything is normal, they are normal, they don’t need anyone else or anywhere else, they can make it work, just the two of them- and haven’t they? Eleven Christmases, she’s made it through without catastrophe striking. Eleven birthdays, too. She picks up the trifle. “Look, it’s apple, your favorite.”

Whether Mae’s pleased or not, she’s never been one to turn down a meal, to Amy’s satisfaction. She pulls off her jumper and sits and eats in her tank top and thick woolen pyjama bottoms, shoveling food into her mouth while Amy heaps more carrots onto her plate, telling her they’ll keep her eyes strong. The bacon rolls burn her tongue, but she doesn’t mind. This is nice. This is good. She is going to get through the end of this year, and the next one, and she’ll be damned if they’re not right here this time next year, looking at their shoddy Christmas tree from the table in the kitchen, eating their small feast.

She pictures Tom at some dinner party with his fiancee’s family, and once again considers the gala. She’ll consult Lucinda for more information after Christmas. There’s still time. No need to make any hasty decisions right now. She has until the twenty eighth to RSVP. Mae eats about as fast as your average eleven year old, then digs into her trifle while Amy polishes off her potatoes. Finally, as they clear the plates away, Amy decides they might as well end the night on a high note. “I know we usually do gifts in the morning,” she says, “but I thought you might like yours tonight.”

It’s not the only thing she’s gotten Mae, but she knows it’s the only thing she’ll really care about- although she might also enjoy the chemist’s set Amy ordered from a catalogue for her, but it’s not what she asked for- Mae is clinging to her sleeve like a little girl, beaming in excitement. “Really? Where is it?”

“Stay here and close your eyes,” Amy instructs, settling her in a chair, then hurries down into the small, dark cellar to retrieve it, wincing at the smell- she’ll definitely need to wash that bedding- and hurries back upstairs, settling the basket onto Mae’s lap. She just fed it in the midst of making dinner, while Mae was still fast asleep, but of course there’s still quite a bit of irate meowing. 

Mae’s eyes snap open, and she knocks off the top of the basket, staring down wildly at the small, scruffy black kitten glaring up at her. Her cry of delight is contagious; Amy smiles widely herself, crouching down beside her to scritch the beast behind the ears. He snaps at her angrily. 

“Salome,” Mae greets it, pleased, and Amy says, “Well, he is a boy, Mae, so-,”

“Sal for short,” Mae says, and bestows upon the kitten a small, experimental kiss upon the head. He claws at her top, and she grins. “Oh, he’s wicked, isn’t he?”

“Incredibly wicked,” Amy straightens back up with a groan, “and incredibly expensive, for the runt of the litter. Black’s a proper witch’s cat, you know.”

“How come you never had a cat? You don’t even have an owl,” Mae points out in between crooning at Sal. 

“The orphanage didn’t allow pets,” Amy says frankly. “Lucky for you, I do. But you’ve got to take good care of him, Mae- you know, change the litter box, and make sure he gets fed, whether he’s here or at school-,”

Sal is already climbing up onto Mae’s shoulder as she giggles. Amy likes to think of herself as fairly hardened, at this point, but she melts a little all the same. She really is a good girl, and she deserves this. God knows none of this has been easy for her, and Amy knows how difficult it can be to uproot yourself, at any age. But Mae’s taken it all in stride, for the most part, and Amy is, well-

“You know I love you very much,” she says, as she puts the dishes in the sink, “and I’m really proud of you, Mae. Alright? I just want you to know that. You’re such a brave girl, coming here with me, and going to school, and… and just being yourself.”

When she glances back at Mae, she’s got a strange look on her face. “What is it?” Amy asks, wondering with a sudden jolt of alarm if she’s about to burst into tears, although Mae hasn’t cried in front of her since she was nine. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Mae says, and turns her attention back to her kitten, humming under her breath.

On Christmas Day Mae opens her chemist’s set and some new clothes littered in bags beneath the tree, and presents Amy with her usual handmade card; she likes to cut out pictures from magazines and words from newspapers and paste them into odd collages. Amy has saved every single one of them over the years. They take a few photos and eat cinnamon buns and Amy forces Mae to put on the outfit she got from Ruby; a bright red velveteen suspender skirt that fits over the top of her crisp white blouse. It matches her favorite headband perfectly, but Mae is already rolling her eyes over the glittery red Mary Jane's.

“I look like a five year old.”

“You look adorable,” says Amy as she ushers her towards the fireplace so they can floo over to Teddy and Patsy’s.

“Exactly,” Mae mutters.

The house in Ipswich is located at the end of a terrace, probably built during the Victorian housing boom. It has two bedrooms, one bath, a sitting room, dining room, and kitchen. Mae has never been in a house with a dining room before; she strolls around looking rather impressed at the thought of anyone having a separate room just to sit down to eat in. Amy oohs and ahhs all the same; Teddy and Patsy are obviously thrilled with finally having a place of their own, and Teddy’s found relatively less stressful work as a mediwizard for St Mungo’s. Patsy’s only complaint is that he’s commonly called away at night, leaving her alone with the baby.

The baby, Paul, is barely a month old, a pink little bald lump who’s just started smiling at his parents. He doesn’t do much but sleep; Amy is almost envious- Mae barely seemed to sleep for more than an hour at a time until she was almost five months old. Mae consents to hold Paul for a few minutes, then hands him back to his mother and wanders off to inspect their Christmas tree and presents. They go to the noon service at the church down the street, which Amy usually finds relaxing; she doesn’t have to do much but sit there and listen for an hour, and while Mae isn’t what one might call a very devout little girl, she is always oddly curious about the Nativity scene in front of the altar. 

They eat dinner very early; at four, which only makes sense because of just how much food Patsy has managed to cook. Mae flops onto the sofa afterwards and promptly passes out, while the grownups linger at the table, drinking coffee and tea. 

“So how’s it been?” Teddy is eager to hear all about how Hogwarts has changed since they graduated, and Patsy smiles as she rocks Paul in his cradle. “Teaching, I mean, that’s- well, it’s amazing, Amy, isn’t it? Who’d have ever thought at this time last year you’d be back in Scotland, teaching!”

Amy smiles back, all the while thinking about how if you’d informed her this was coming at Christmas last year, she’d probably have fled with Mae in the middle of the night to America or Australia. But it’s easy enough to fudge over all the unpleasant details and focus on the positives- the raise in pay, having complete control over her office and classroom, the joys of seeing children learn and develop, her more motivated and inspiring students. Teddy takes the baby up to bed while Amy and Patsy handle the dishes; that hasn’t changed much, at least. 

“How’s it been for you?” Amy asks honestly once they’re in the relative privacy of the small kitchen, recently painted fern green. “I mean, the move, and the baby- I’m sorry I couldn’t be there when you were in labor, Pat, but Teddy said it moved quickly-,”

“Wonderful,” Patsy says, a little too quickly, and then laughs at the look Amy gives her as she dumps some cutlery into the sink. “I- of course it’s been stressful, it has, but we had each other, I suppose. And he inherited the house, so we didn’t have to worry about a mortgage or anything, just some quick renovations… Oh, I have to show you the nursery still! It’s so cute. Teddy got this teddy bear wallpaper…” She trails off and sighs. “It has been… different, though. I… well, not working. You know. He still gets to go out and help people, and I’m just…” she waves a hand around the kitchen. “The neighborhood is lovely, though, and we’re so lucky. It’ll just be an adjustment, you know, to being home all the time.”

Amy pauses mid-drying of a platter. “Well, it won’t be forever. You’ll be back to work before you know it, I mean, babies grow so quickly…” It’s her turn to trail off at Patsy’s slightly rueful smile. “What?”

“Amy, I’m not going back to work,” Patsy says gently. “Teddy makes enough for us on his salary for a decent life here, and I wouldn’t want to leave Paul with anyone else.”

“Sure, but when he’s a toddler-,”

She shakes her head. “No. I… I know you’ll think it’s foolish of me-,”

“I just think you have so much to offer as a healer,” Amy says slowly. “That I wouldn’t want you to feel like you ought not to get back into it, just because you have a child now. I’ve made it work with Mae-,”

“And you’ve really struggled,” Patsy silences her with her blatant honesty. “You’re an amazing mother, Amy. And you’ve worked so hard. But I don’t want to juggle both. Teddy agrees; it’s best that one of us stay home, and seeing as I’m the mother…”

“Right, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t-,”

“It’s just the ways things are going to be,” Patsy says in that same softly firm voice. “I don’t hold it against him. And I never… well, I never had a mother. Or a father, really. I don’t want that for Paul. And we want to try to have more children, if we can, or maybe adopt... Oh, don’t look at me like that- you shouldn’t pity me!”

Amy sighs and sets down her dishrag, then moves over to hug her. “I could never pity you. You’re my friend. I just want you to be happy. And if you’re happy with this, then I’m glad for you. Really, Pat.”

It jars at her all the same. Does Mae sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a father who went out to work and a mother who was home with her all the time, who hadn’t brushed off her pleas to play with her to go back to work, who hadn’t always been so tired and irritable? Will she feel she had less of a childhood for it? It was still much more than Amy ever got, but still.

They spend Boxing Day as usual with the Hirschs; Mae plays with Joel and Isaac in the street outside their townhouse in Leeds, while Vera insists she take home a box of ‘leftover’ latkes and Amy makes use of their owl to write Lucinda and ask a few questions about the gala. She receives her answers much quicker than she’d expected, while Mae is in the other room trying to bribe the boys into trading her some of their chocolate gelt for a few marbles she produced out of thin air… or stole from some classmate. 

Yes, the majority of MESP, excluding those currently out of the country on holiday or too old to travel, are expected to be present at this gala. Yes, occasionally non-members will be invited, but it’s rare. In total, they can expect perhaps two hundred guests. The dress code will be very formal. The food is supposed to be quite good; the Princes have apparently managed to book some very pricey caterers. Yes, Lucinda herself plans on attending, ‘mostly for the gossip’. 

The very obvious risk assessment that follows for Amy, as she smells the roast goose cooking in the kitchen and listens to Mae laughing and chattering with Vera’s sons and her playful banter with her husband, is that she’s going to be around people who are part of Tom’s order, possibly his inner circle. But she was already around a few of them, and she didn’t even know how much of a threat they posed at the time. For Merlin’s sake, she spent two hours in a locked room with Nott and Prince. She has no idea what orders he’s handed down, who he’s clued in, who knows what. She doesn’t even know how loyal any of them really are to him.

It seems reasonable that there’s only one way to find out. There is a possibility that she could be in danger, if she attends. That’s easy enough to admit. But the majority of MESP, statistically speaking, are not members of the Sacred 28 or people likely to be devoted followers of the new minister. They’re normal, average, typically quite intelligent people there for a holiday party. She’s not infiltrating some top secret meeting. If she doesn’t go, well, no risk, no reward. 

If she does go, and she brings a vial of Veritaserum… yes, she could be somehow caught with it, but she’s smuggled things before, and around much more dangerous people. Yes, she could manage to use it on someone, and still not find out anything useful. She could be caught trying to slip it in someone’s drink. Or she could just bring it, bide her time, and wait to see if she can find anything out even without drugging someone with a truth serum.

Her other option is waiting on Dumbledore to collect more information, or going some other route of trying to find more about the Knights of Walpurgis. But this like a crisp, ripe apple just hanging in front of her, waiting to be plucked. What else is she going to do, track down Slughorn? She’s spoken to the man maybe two or three times in her life, and even Dumbledore admits he doesn’t know where he is. That could take months. This is in a few days. 

And if he shows up? the little voice whispers, as she sits down to dinner with the Hirschs and Mae. Tom obviously isn’t a member of MESP. Might he show up anyways? Yes. Of course he could. He’s also expected to open the Wizengamot tomorrow morning. Dancing the night away the night before doesn’t seem all that sound, for someone so rigid. And if he shows his face… they will be surrounded by hundreds of people. Guests will be coming and going all night. She can leave the instant she hears anything about his arrival; it’s very difficult for the brand new Minister to show up anywhere without being instantly recognized and swarmed with admirers, after all. 

Besides, loathe as she is to admit it, he could do the same thing at Hogwarts. Dippet is hardly going to lock the gates in the face of the Ministry. If he really wanted to, he could be waiting in her office for her the day she goes back to work. That thought is about as comforting as you might expect. But clearly he has his own reasons for wanting to keep some distance. She needs to use that hesitance of his to confront her outright to her advantage. All eyes will be on him now, and he’s made plenty of enemies within the Ministry. She’s not going to march right up to his office and drop in for a little friendly chat anytime soon, but she can’t just avoid group gatherings for the next decade or two in case he decides to stop by and pose for some pictures.

“Mae, how would you like to spend New Year’s Eve with Danny and Aunt V?” she asks as Danny cuts into the goose, and Joel and Isaac break into excited chatter about how she can help them with their sparklers and how the cousins from Portugal are coming over for dinner on New Year’s Eve and they’re going to listen to that new radio show-

Vera catches her eye, not upset but with a knowing look of ‘You’re up to something’ and Amy smiles placidly back at her with a little shrug. Well, she is.

Mae gives her the silent treatment for most of the day leading up to the gala, although she comes in to silently judge Amy with Sal while she curls her parted hair for the first time in years. 

“You look ridiculous,” Mae says waspishly as Amy applies a sleekening potion to the very full curls to make them shine in the light. “You never do your hair like that.”

“I can’t wear a ponytail to a gala,” Amy says patiently, teasing out one of her curls and watching it spring pleasingly back into place. They look a little too like victory rolls for her liking, but she’s not a stylist. She stands up, smoothing down her shift, and moves to get changed as Mae lounges on her bed like an irate Cleopatra, guarded by a panther. Amy’s dress is a good five years out of date, if not more, and borrowed hastily from Vera’s sister Miriam- royal blue silk organza with a velvet ribboned bodice. Blue has always looked reliably good on her, and it matches her solitary nice purse. Besides, it’s easier to run in a cocktail dress, even a full-skirted one, than a heavy, long ballgown that would come to her ankles. 

She’s putting on her faithful kitten heels when Mae adds snidely, “I don’t even know why you’re going to some stupid party.”

“Networking,” Amy says mildly, checking the time. “And dancing.”

“I dance better than you.”

“Only because you’ve got a ballerina build,” Amy reaches over and pokes her in the rib. “So skinny.”

Sal hisses at her, and Mae glares at the low ceiling. “I can’t believe you’re shipping me off.”

“It’s one night, love,” Amy fights to keep the exasperation from her tone as she slips on her formal black robes over her dress; they cover up her shoulders to keep it as modest as a thirty year old woman’s outfit should probably be, but still hang open to reveal the rich blue of the dress, and don’t flow as awkwardly over the skirt as she’d feared. “You’ll probably be asleep when I get back, but we’ll be home in the morning, alright?”

“Fine,” Mae says. “Do as you please.” She sounds like a reproving mother seeing her daughter hop onto the back of some hoodlum’s motorcycle, engine revving. 

There’s a knock at the door. “That will be Madam Amell,” Amy bends down, balancing on her low heels, and kisses Mae on the cheek, gives Sal a quick pet. “Come on.”

Mae trudges downstairs after her and shuffles sullenly over to the fireplace, setting Sal down on the floor. “Hirsch Place,” Amy says clearly, throwing some powder into the fire, and smiles brightly, reassuringly at Mae as she steps in. “Have fun!”

Mae pulls a face, then vanishes with a crackle and a pop, leaving only green embers floating behind her.

Amy hurries to get the door, revealing Lucinda, dressed impeccably as always in a scarlet shirtwaist dress with an open collar and jet black buttons down the front, ending at the tulle sash at the waist. She adjusts her matching black gloves and feathered hat as she looks Amy up and down approvingly. “You’re one of the few who can pull off the robes over an outfit. Cheers.”

“Cheers, and happy New Year,” Amy takes her arm as they step out onto the stoop. “I haven’t made us too late, have I?”

“Not at all,” Lucinda says dryly, “if they insist on summoning everyone to bloody Ireland this year. Ridiculous. They used to hold it in London every time, reliably. Now it’s one massive popularity contest, feels like a debutante’s ball more and more- everyone making up excuses to bring their children, cousins, pets-,”

The Prince House is just that; a manor house, but a far more recent construction than the only other pureblood estate Amy has ever visited, the Parkinsons. This had to be constructed in the Victorian era, no earlier, and it shows; “New money,” Lucinda jokes as they walk past the elaborate stone fountain bubbling in the front, and Amy grins wryly in agreement. The house is lavishly decorated, no expense spared, rich wood paneling and thick Persian rugs, half a hundred statues and sculptures and newly acquired works of art hanging from all the walls. There’s a great hall and gallery cleared to make space for dancing, and guests filter up and down the stairs, drinks in hand, out onto the grand terrace out back where several bonfires roar.

Amy wonders how many house elves they have, or if those only come with the ‘real’ pureblood estates. Mrs Prince is holding court outside the library with a bevvy of friends, their laughter tinkling down like crushed glass from above. Mr Prince is consulting the opinion of another older wizard in front of one of the grand hearths. Amy gets herself a drink and gets in line for the buffet, then follows Lucinda upstairs to one of the many parlours, where they conveniently or not end up sitting quite close to Therese Nott. 

Amy feels the light weight of the vial in her purse, considering while the two older women make polite conversation, before Therese finally says, “Miss Benson. Such a pleasure to see you out and about. We’d worried you might not make it tonight, what with your daughter. It can be so difficult to find childcare these days.” It’s polite enough of a barb.

“Some friends of mine agreed to let her spend the night with them,” Amy says, hoping her lipstick hasn’t smeared on the napkin she just used. “I think she was a bit sad to miss out, though, but I told her grownup parties were always dull for children.”

Therese laughs, and Lucinda interjects, “Speaking of children, was that Miss Eileen I just saw go slinking downstairs? What an exquisite dress-,” Amy turns slightly in her seat and gets a glimpse of a dark haired teenage girl moving slowly down the crowded stairs into the hall below. 

“Eileen’s a wonderful student,” she says, turning back around. “I’m glad she’s getting the chance to show off a little.”

“Yes, the Princes haven’t hosted a party in years,” Therese comments, and given the woman’s guarded nature last time they spoke Amy wonders if this is her sherry talking. Maybe she won’t even need the Veritaserum, with all the drinking going on. She just has to find the right person who’s just pissed enough to let things slip. “You know, they had so many… worries before. What with poor Eileen.”

“Was she ill?” Lucinda asks, brow creased in concern.

Therese smiles, but it doesn’t reach her green eyes. “In a sense. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard, Lucinda. They were consulting healers left and right at the time. They were convinced she was a squib,” she lowers her voice at that, as if discussing an embarrassing medical condition. “Nine years old the first time she showed any signs of magic. Can you imagine? Mortifying.”

“Hm. You’d never know it now,” Lucinda says diplomatically, standing up. “I think I’ll get a refill- Amy, did you want something?”

“Just the powder room,” Amy says, standing up herself. Right. She knows Eileen, and more importantly, Eileen knows her, and trusts her. At least, Amy hopes she does. She’s not likely to be drunk, and Amy’s not sunk so low as to try to slip a child some truth serum, but Eileen’s father is actively attempting to join the Knights and works alongside a recognized member of them. Where better to start? 

Given her relative youth compared to most of the people here- there’s a few sons and daughters in their teens or twenties, but not many- and her height- Eileen isn’t hard to locate. She’s wearing an impressive ochre evening dress with a lace petticoat and rather grownup white silk gloves up to her elbows, although she seems more interested in rolling them up and down anxiously than strutting about the gallery below. Amy almost doesn’t recognize her with her black hair brushed back from her face and curled, but Eileen recognizes her, her dark eyes widening in startled confusion for a moment as she straightens up from her slouch.

“Enjoying the party?” Amy asks, coming up alongside her to peer over the landing bannister as well. The band’s finally starting to play, and a few couples are already making their way out onto the dance floor. Her tone must have been more sarcastic than she intended; Eileen flushes and gives an awkward half-nod.

“Yes,” she says, doubtfully. “It’s… um- all very exciting. I haven’t come out into society yet, so this is my first real…” She trails off, then concludes with, “How are you, Professor?”

“Sweltering,” Amy confesses, shrugging off her robes. “And so must you be, with those gloves.”

Eileen smiles slightly, then looks around and peels them off. “Don’t throw them down now,” Amy cautions jokingly, and gets a genuine giggle from the girl. “You look beautiful, Eileen. Really.”

Eileen bites her lip, then admits, “Don’t tell my mother, but I’ve been hiding from Colin Montague all night.”

Amy knows Colin; he’s in her sixth year NEWT class, a husky blonde boy with a casual, almost effortless disregard for others. “You have my condolences,” she says, and Eileen seems to suppress another laugh, then freezes up-

“Oh, no, he’s right there-,”

Sure enough, Colin Montague is coming towards them.

“Come on, act casual,” Amy takes her by the now gloveless arm and quickly leads her down the other side of the stairs, ducking around the back of the room, out into a darkened hall, and then across in what turns out to be an empty study. Eileen closes the door hastily behind them, then glances at her guiltily.

“Sorry. I just- I’m in no mood for it right now. My mother thinks I’m too standoffish.” Surprisingly or not, Eileen seems much more comfortable speaking with an adult than with anyone her own age. Amy wonders if it’s the product of a lonely childhood or being forced to act grownup and composed at all times. 

“I don’t think you’re standoffish,” she says, “just… reserved. It’s not a bad thing, Eileen. Nothing wrong with being choosy about who you hang around with.”

“I’m a Prince,” Eileen wrinkles her nose, “we can’t be seen ‘hanging around’ with anyone.” Then she sighs. “See? I sound like a snot. I’m sorry, Professor. You’ve probably got loads of people to talk to.”

“Not really,” Amy admits. “I’m a very recent member of MESP.”

“You’re still a really talented potioneer,” Eileen comments. She looks around the dimly lit study. “This is my father’s. Where he entertains people. You know, trying to convince them we’re just as good as they are.” She seems to have just realized she said that aloud and reddens yet again, clamping up.

“Some people care a lot about appearances,” Amy says quietly after a moment. “I think we all do, to an extent. It’s nice to feel included, by, well… the upper crust. Regardless of where you come from. It feels… special.”

“I’m not special,” Eileen says. “I think he wishes I were.” She folds her pale arms over her ballgown, and sits down in an armchair with a sigh. “I drank a fifth of whiskey before this,” she confesses, impulsively. “Then I jumped in the bath.”

Well. That would explain the sudden chattiness and the lack of smell. Amy feels a sudden surge of guilt. Eileen’s fifteen, a bit drunk, although admirably holding her own, and desperately lonely and overwhelmed. The one adult she feels like she can open up to is only talking to her to get information about her parents. She sits down in the chair beside Eileen. “Have you eaten anything? Why don’t I go get you a plate-,”

“No, no,” Eileen shakes her head. “I’m fine, I ate.” She prods at the tight waistline of her gown. “Not much.”

“Water,” Amy decides, and gets up to look for some kind of cup. She finds a glass sitting in one of the cabinets, and fills it with her wand. It will taste a bit strange- conjured water always does- but it’s better than nothing. She hands it to Eileen, who takes a small sip through pursed lips.

“Just drink that,” Amy says, wondering if this is what she has to look forward to with Mae. “And tell me if you’re going to be sick.”

“I won’t be sick,” Eileen says, after taking a larger gulp of water. “I feel fine. Just sort of tired.” She peers around the study once more, as if she’s never seen it before. “I used to hide in here when I was little.”

“Playing with your father?”

“No,” Eileen says, slightly crestfallen. “No. Just… hiding. They were always fretting over me. But I’m fine. I mean, I’m a real witch and everything,” she giggles, then goes quiet again. “Poor excuse for a daughter, though.”

“Eileen,” Amy says. “You’re a very bright young woman. I think anyone would be proud to have you for a daughter.”

“Not very pretty, am I? Or charming? Or funny?” Eileen smiles drolly, arching a thick, dark brow. “Just about the only man I could ever attract,” she rolls her eyes and takes another sip of her water, “is Colin bloody Montague, huh? That’s me. The belle of the ball.”

“You shouldn’t be worrying about attracting anyone, boys or men,” Amy says dryly. “You’re fifteen.”

“Sixteen in February,” Eileen gives an exaggerated sigh. “Can’t hardly wait.”

“I didn’t like being sixteen much either,” Amy tells her, honestly.

“Yes, well, you’re not sixteen anymore, Professor,” Eileen says hoarsely. “No offence.” She sips at her water again but spills a little down her chin. 

“None taken.” Amy clasps her hands in her lap for a moment, then straightens. “Listen. Why don’t we tell your mother you feel ill and let you go up to bed and have a nap?” She doesn’t feel right leaving the poor girl like this; she might not be falling over herself drunk, but she’s obviously impaired and Amy doesn’t like to think about the trouble she might get herself into in this state. 

“I actually hid in here last week,” Eileen is saying, as Amy stands up, offering her her hand. “You know. Hiding. I don’t know from who. Then my father came in with Mister Nott, talking about the party, and I had to hide behind the sofa,” she giggles awkwardly as she stands up. Amy notices she’s not wearing heels; maybe her mother was worried about them making her any taller; as it stands, Eileen must be nearly 5’10”. 

“Yeah?” she asks as she steers Eileen towards the door. “Party planning, were they?”

“That and talking about Father’s application to join the… the Knights of…” Eileen clearly can’t remember, but Amy very well can.

“The Knights of Walpurgis?” she asks. “I’ve heard of them.”

“Yes. The Knights of Wal… Wallaby,” Eileen snorts. “Stupidest name in the world. Father says it will give him a real leg-up if he gets admittance. Then maybe we could be added to the Sacred 28. Get some respect,” she shrugs as Amy hesitates before the heavy wood door. “Like we don’t have any already? We’ve got more money than the Rosiers and the Montagues right now. I shouldn’t have to…,” she sighs. 

“Does your father have to do something in particular to join?” Amy asks slowly. “Did you… hear anything about that, Eileen?”

Eileen stares at her, then curls her lip slightly. “He had to change the guest list. Mother was… so annoyed.”

“He had to invite some people he wasn’t planning on?”

“Yes,” Eileen pulls at the doorknob herself, hauling it open with surprising strength for a tipsy teenage girl. “You know. Ex… expand our horizons. Like the Minister. Mother doesn’t like him.”

“The Minister’s invited?” Amy is in the midst of a genuine battle to keep her tone steady and even, as Eileen steps out into the darkened hall.

Eileen opens her mouth to reply, only to fall silent when a voice calls out to her. “Eileen! There you are!” Mrs Prince is hurrying down the hall towards her, lifting her dress robes slightly to do so. “Where have you been? Mrs Montague and I were just discussing- oh, Miss Benson, was it?” She looks alarmingly like an older version of Eileen, Mrs Prince, although her smile is more forced than anything else. “Edgar’s told me all about you.”

“Eileen was feeling a little faint,” Amy says, “so we were just sitting in the study while I got her a cup of water.”

“Are you alright?” Mrs Prince feels at her daughter’s flushed face. “You feel hot. Where are your gloves, darling?”

“I don’t know,” Eileen confesses. 

Her mother sighs. “Come along. Let’s take a turn outside, there’s some very nice young women I want you to meet- Charlie Burke’s wife, she’s not much older than you- thank you, Miss Benson!”

Amy watches as Eileen is dragged off by her mother, and moves to follow after them back into the main hall, only to collide with someone turning round a corner. She steps back, annoyed, as Charles Burke curses under his breath, only to pause when he realizes who he’s looking at. “Miss Benson,” he says. “Just who I was looking for.”

Amy can think of a few reasons why Burke might have been looking for her, none of them good. “Burke,” she says, taking a slight step back. He advances. “I didn’t realize you were a member of MESP.”

“Me?” He seems bemused. “No.”

“Your wife, then?” she asks politely. “I heard she was here-,”

“Samantha doesn’t work,” he all but sneers. He’s clearly not getting out of her way. 

Amy squares her shoulders, then realizes she left her purse in the study. She can’t just abandon it there. She smiles politely, then turns on her heel, moving back towards the study, only to realize to her mild alarm that he’s following. “I’m sorry, I just left my purse-,” No sooner is she through the doorway then the door’s shut behind him.

“If you’re looking for Mr. Prince-,”

He glances around the empty room, crosses briskly to the armchair where her purse is lying, and picks it up. Amy tenses, but he doesn’t open it. Her wand isn’t in there, anyways, it’s tucked into her stocking. She’s got to get a holster one of these days. “Sit down,” he says. “No need to be alarmed. I’ve just got someone who’d like to have a few words with you in a bit.”

“In a bit?” Amy echoes him through gritted teeth. “I came with Lucinda Amell, I’d rather not leave her worrying where I’ve gone-,”

“She’s talking to Samantha,” he sounds utterly unconcerned. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it won’t be long.”

“Might I ask who’s so eager to speak with me?” Amy says.

“The Minister,” he sighs as if wearied by this entire thing. “Nothing serious, of course. It’s only that you seem to have misplaced something of his.”

Amy looks at him, then adopts her most confused, dull stare. “I’m sure I haven’t misplaced anything of the _Minister_ ’s,” she says with an incredulous edge. 

“Sit,” he says, as if speaking to an unruly small dog. 

Amy glances towards the door. Burke produces his wand from his shirtsleeve, and mutters a charm. It locks itself. “Let me assure you,” he says, turning her purse over in his hand, “this isn’t how I envisioned spending my night either. But that’s not to say we can’t have ourselves a pleasant wait.” He looks towards the liquor cabinet in the corner with interest. “Why don’t you fix me a drink?”

Amy is half delighted, half outraged. Heat rises in her cheeks. Charles Burke smiles back at her, that same ugly, bland look he gave her and Mae while stamping their papers months ago. The banal, bureaucratic, 'don’t worry, I can wait' look. “I’ll fix you whatever drink you like,” she says, “if you’ll give me back my purse.”

He looks at her for a moment, evaluating, probably noting the purse is clearly too small to contain her wand, and then tosses it at her. It falls short of her reach, forcing her to crouch down and pick it up. She’s praying the vial hasn’t broken. He sits down, and when she stands back up, purse in hand, smoothing her rumpled skirt, is reclining behind the desk as though it were his own. “Deal.”

Amy looks steadily back at him, then lets herself look a little afraid, which isn’t hard, although it’s not him she’s worried about. She averts her gaze, hunches her shoulders, brushes at her hair anxiously. He seems bolstered by it. “Well, get on with it. Vodka tonic ought to be manageable for you, shouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” she says quietly, moving over to the liquor cabinet, conscious of his gaze on her back all the while, watching to see if she tries anything. She doesn’t. She reaches the cabinet, pulls out a bottle of vodka and some tonic water, then has to lean up on her tiptoes to get to the glasses. Her fingers brush against one, knocking it off the shelf; it plummets to the ground and shatters.

Out of the corner of her eye, he starts in alarm, then snaps, “Bit jumpy, aren’t we?” as she mutters an apology and bends down behind the bar- “Don’t bother,” he says shortly, and Amy straightens innocently back up, having slipped the vial out of her purse and into one fist in the mean time. She turns slightly as she pours, her robes pooling around her elbows, having slid off her shoulders, and masks herself emptying two drops of Veritaserum into the vodka. 

“So sorry,” she says, in a small voice, as she leaves the tiny vial and her purse behind to bring his drink over to him, offering a shaky, utterly fake smile as he takes his first sip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. God, this was a long one. But I didn't want to just breeze too much through the Christmas stuff, and I knew what note I wanted to end it on. Tom and Amy at the same party on New Year's, what could go wrong?
> 
> 2\. Jaime's joke is really not that funny, but it relates to the irony of saying 'Happy Christmas!' when his Christmas is... not so happy at the moment.
> 
> 3\. I felt it'd be out of character for both Amy and Dumbledore to suddenly lay it all on the table, so they're both playing coy with one another, hesitant to reveal the entirety of what they may or may not know. 
> 
> 4\. I really tried to strike a balance in this chapter between Amy being reckless and her being realistic. Mae's impulsiveness and habit of not looking before she leaps didn't just come from her father. She makes a reasonable or not case with herself as to why she ought to go to this gala, despite the obvious risks. In addition, in order for the plot to, well, thicken, I can't just have Amy and Tom dance around each other for 20 chapters straight (15 chapters straight, maybe). At some point there has to be some kind of boiling over.
> 
> 5\. The Princes have some serious money but, that money is still considered 'new' and their pedigree is not quite accepted by the entirety of the pureblood elite, as they are not members of the Sacred 28. That combined with the fact that they only have one child, a girl, who presumably the family line will die out with, and with there being serious concerns that said child might have been a squib until she belatedly showed magic... 
> 
> 6\. Eileen got a little moment in the spotlight this chapter! It was nice to show another side of her, albeit a drunk one. 
> 
> 7\. It's pretty typical of Amy to go into this party with the intent of some serious subterfuge... only to get sidetracked by teenage angst. Her maternal instincts sort of kicked in there, dealing with Eileen.
> 
> 8\. Everyone's favorite Ministry worker, Charles Burke, is back! Yes, he fucking sucks. Yes, he's a fucking creep. Yes, Amy is successfully drugging him. Old habits die hard?
> 
> 9\. We will be seeing quite a bit of Tom and ringing in the new year next chapter.
> 
> 10\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com).


	15. Amy VII

COUNTY LONGFORD, DECEMBER 1957

Amy studies her lap and fidgets in a decent display of discomfort while Burke drinks. Veritaserum is tricky; she had to write an essay about it on her Potions OWL, way back when. Some wizards seem to be have more natural resistance to it than others, and it’s commonly known to be useless against occlumens and seers because it heavily depends upon perception. It requires special permissions to be used as evidence of someone’s guilt or innocence in court, and even then it’s considered far from damning proof in most cases. It can’t grant someone knowledge they don’t possess, and it doesn’t influence your personal beliefs. 

“Perfect sincerity,” Slughorn once described it as in class, “but seldom perfect truth.” 

Its effects when combined with alcohol… are mixed. Truthfully, she can’t accurately predict how Burke might react to it. And if she’s not careful with her questions and how she leads into them, she will make him very suspicious. Veritaserum doesn’t dull any of his senses; it won’t incapacitate him physically. And it’s well-known that it rarely kicks in immediately. So Amy holds her tongue, and does what he expects her to do; she sits there silently and looks frightened, clutching her purse in her lap and keeping her eyes trained downwards. Every so often, she glances in the direction of the locked door, straining to hear footsteps outside- that’s not an act.

Worst comes to worst, she hexes him and climbs out the window. How hard could that be? 

“Having ourselves a little sulk, are?” Burke finally asks; she glances up and realizes he’s drunk most of the vodka tonic. Amy suppresses a smile of relief and turns widened blue eyes on him, drawing back slightly in her seat. He hasn’t moved from behind the desk yet. Seeing her stare back at him, he smiles thinly. “That’s alright. We don’t have to speak. In fact, I think it’s an improvement on you, Benson.”

“I barely knew you in school,” she says in a low, measured voice; part of her is genuinely curious. “I don’t know what you’re so miffed about.” Aside from a minor quidditch rivalry, she never had any particularly nasty encounters with Burke; she considered the likes of Virgil Mulciber and Alexander Nott far more threatening at the time. But in all honesty, she was never really all that concerned about any of them, especially when they were grew older, because if she ever was around them, it was for a few minutes in the presence of Tom. 

For all her insistence that he wasn’t her keeper, some small, smug, shameful part of her actually took pride in it. The idea that someone cared enough for her that they would protect her, defend her. Think what you like, she’d jeer inside her head when she came over to their table to ask Tom what he’d thought about the Charms homework, or if he was planning on going into Hogsmeade that weekend. Make all the faces you please. You’d never dare say a word about it. 

She was a silly child greedy for any scrap of affection, regardless of what form it came in. She knows that now. 

“I have a low opinion of people who toss away any chance for improvement in the interest of rolling around with muggles,” he says, honestly, she thinks, and she’s not sure if he’s being as blunt and crude as possible to unnerve her, or if this is the serum. It might be the serum. She’s pretty certain this is the serum. “You’re part of the problem. It’s shameful, really. To think you were halfway decent looking in school… reduced to this,” he tilts his chin up at her as if to indicate a steaming pile of shit that he’s just now smelling. “Just another muggle loving whore.”

Well, she’s feeling a bit more confident that Tom hasn’t exactly gone around confiding in every Tom, Dick, and Harry that he might have a child out there. “Is that what you think of me?” she says, wrinkling her nose. “That’s why you dislike me? Not because I hung around Tom in school?”

“We all get the urge to sow our wild oats, sooner or later,” he shrugs dismissively. “I can hardly hold it against him. Like I said. You were halfway decent looking.”

Amy gives a slow little nod, as if understanding. “Is that what he called it?”

“He didn’t call it anything,” Burke sneers at her. “No one bothered to ask. You’ve a high opinion of yourself. Do you think we all sat around the common room, gossiping about these things?”

Judging by what she knows of adolescent males, yes, absolutely. “What’s shameful about it, Charles?” she asks quietly. “That I had a child with someone I loved?” Something catches in her throat at that, but it’s alright, because it just makes her sound choked up and genuinely upset. 

He exhales in sour bemusement. “One doesn’t love their lessers. Scratching an itch, having a bit of fun, that’s one thing. Copulating with them,” he trails off in genuine disgust, as though he were speaking about bestiality or something equally depraved. She realizes after a moment that to him, it is. It’s not an act. The serum is working. He is genuinely disgusted by the fact she supposedly had a child with a muggle man. He is disturbed by Mae’s very existence. 

For a moment, she pictures Charles Burke anywhere near her daughter with that look in his eyes and that tone of voice, and she wants to take that glass from his hand and smash it into his mouth. “What would have been my improvement?” she asks. “Marrying anyone with magical blood?”

“I’ve no issue with mudbloods wedding other mudbloods,” he says. “At least you wouldn't be sullying your magic. You could have done alright for yourself, had you been inclined to behave in a more sensible manner.”

“Knowing my place, you mean.”

“Look at that. You can learn,” he drawls, then finishes off the last of his drink, setting the glass down on the desk and standing up. “Now, if could apply that sort of dedication to remembering where you put what you stole, we might be through with this in time for the fireworks,” he waves a hand vaguely at one of the curtained windows, which looks out over the dark, rolling, frozen ground of the Prince estate.

Amy swallows. “What did I steal?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he says so immediately that she knows it is working. “Nor do I particularly care. What matters if that you’re a brazen little thief who’s been rewarded for a lifetime of self-sabotage with positions so far above your capacities that it’s truly laughable.”

“My capacities?”

“To think of _you_ , taking over the position left by Horace Slughorn?” he scoffs, coming around the back of her chair. Amy stiffens; he keeps a hand on the top of the high back, as if in warning, standing just behind to the left of her. She can almost feel his breath skimming across the top of her head. “I’ll admit, the man’s often overrated as some sort of pioneer in the field, but at least he was deserving of his career. It’s shameful, what Hogwarts has become. Rewarding the least deserving for the barest modicum of effort.”

“What has… what does Tom think?” she asks after a moment, still trying to be so careful in her wording. Fortunately he already likes the sound of his own voice. 

“Aren’t you familiar,” she can hear his scowl, if not see it right now. “I’m not privy to every one of the _Minister_ ’s thoughts.”

“But he must trust you quite a lot, if he told you to find me here,” Amy resists the urge to glance up at him, keeps on staring straight ahead. This is fine. She’s been in more uncomfortable situations. This is fine. Her wand is right against her leg. Some of her carefully positioned curls are already beginning to come loose; one is hanging beside her face, against her cheek.

Burke leans down and almost clinically tucks it back behind her ear, as if straightening a lopsided throw pillow or a crooked painting hanging on a wall. She instinctively flinches away; he snorts in amusement. This is like a game to him, she realizes. Making her uncomfortable, trying to frighten and degrade her. Amy finally looks back at him. The look on his face is not one of leering interest or cold hatred. There’s nothing there at all beyond a spiteful sort of eagerness, like a child prodding at an insect with a stick. Letting it scurry away only to catch it again.

And to think she’d thought him one of the milder ones of Tom’s little group. She wonders what the likes of Virgil Mulciber is up to these days. Nothing good. “I don’t think he told you to do that,” she says, very quietly, looking straight at him, too incensed to pretend at fear.

“No, he didn’t,” Burke says. “He told me to wait with you. But not to harm you. He does trust me. More than most. I’ve proven myself. My competence.”

“How did you prove yourself?”

“By doing things correctly the first time round,” he answers confidently. “Not like some of those other bumbling idiots they’ve allowed in. It undermines the entire organization.” If he is aware he is referencing the Knights of Walpurgis right in front of her, he doesn’t show it. Maybe he’s confident she’ll never get the chance to tell anyone about, or maybe the serum and the vodka have combined to strip nearly all his inhibitions away. 

“But they allowed you in. The Knights of Walpurgis. I’ve heard of them,” she says, pulse quickening. “I didn’t know the Minister was a member.”

“He’s not,” says Burke, startling her.

“He’s not a part of the Knights?”

“He’s our lord commander,” Burke is still regarding her with that sick sort of curiosity. “The first and the last.”

“But you sound like you’re his right hand man.”

“He has more than two hands,” Burke doesn’t seem to take offense to this, luckily, or maybe he’s just oblivious at this point, so secure in the knowledge that she is at his mercy. 

“How many?” Amy asks.

“More than you could count,” and he smiles at her genuine look of alarm.

She composes herself quickly. “He told you I’ve stolen something from him?”

“Yes. Don’t bother to deny it; it’s all over your face. You’re not nearly as tricky as you think you are.”

“And he… means to come ask me to return it to him, is that it?”

“In a sense.”

Damn it, she needs to ask it a different way. “What is he going to do when he gets here?”

“I told you,” Burke steps around so he is standing in front of her seat. “Have a chat.”

“Does he think I have it on me right now?”

“If he did, would I be standing here speaking with you?” Burke asks drolly. That does seem to sink in for him; that he is, in fact standing here, speaking with her. A brief look of concern comes over his face, as if he’s surprised at himself. He steps back from her; Amy cautiously stands as he moves over to the desk, wanting to put more distance between them. Ideally, she wants to be in the best vantage point in the room, so if it comes down to a duel-

If it comes down to a duel, it’s not going to end well for her, but she’s not exactly going to throw her wand down and beg mercy, either. She thinks she could handle Burke. She has a few tricks left, and he clearly underestimates her. Tom is another matter.

“Sit down,” he sounds like a weary schoolteacher now, as if inwardly berating himself for having gotten so caught up in their back-and-forth; or maybe growing leery of her chattiness. 

“I’ve been sitting all night,” she says. “Can’t I walk around? This makes me nervous.” Sensing her window of opportunity is running out, “What other sorts of things do you do for Tom?”

He stares at her, jaw set for a moment, not answering. Fucking hell. “Have you ever done something you… you didn’t want to do?” she tries again.

“Yes,” it comes out between his teeth.

Amy stops her pacing, adjusts her grip on her purse. “Something illegal? Have you hurt anyone, on his orders?”

He picks up the now nearly empty glass he drank from, looks at it, and then throws it at her. Amy dodges easily, but jumps back all the same as it shatters, ice seeping into the thick rug underfoot. She keeps a hand on the outside of her skirt, feeling at her wand underneath, watching him. He is red-faced and breathless. If he suspects she did something to his drink, he’s unwilling to voice that and admit to his own incompetence.

“How does Tom intend to get back what I stole?” she asks him in a hard, flat voice. “If I won’t hand it over.”

“Pick that up,” he says. “Now.”

“Answer me,” she says. “You must want to. It’s all over your face.”

“Pick that up,” he says. “You. Conniving. Little. Bitch.”

“Is he worried I might destroy it?”

He opens his mouth automatically, then tries to bite back the words; what comes out is garbled, disjointed mess, before he slams one hand down onto the desk, maybe hoping to shock himself out of it. “Yes,” he gasps out, before pulling his wand with the other.

“You can’t harm me,” Amy says, suppressing any doubt. “He’d want me in one piece.” She snakes her left hand to wrench up the hem of her skirt all the same.

But his lips are forming the words all the same, and she throws herself to the side, onto a leather sofa, as his curse hits the bookshelf behind her. Amy rolls over on the sofa, comes up with her wand, and charms the shattered glass off the rug with a swish and flick of her wrist and a muttered spell. She hops gamely back up on her feet; it’s been a while, but she feels ready enough. Ready as she’ll ever be. The glass shards blast towards him like hail on the wind; he yells and ducks behind the desk as they launch themselves at his face.

He comes back up a little bloodied, but not enough. “Cr-,”

The door behind them swings smoothly open as though the hinges were newly greased. 

Burke aborts; pockets his wand and backs away from the desk. Amy turns as though on a swivel and keeps her wand raised. The man who’s just stepped into the room casts a look at both of them, then closes the door behind him. He doesn’t have to speak, and she barely sees his wand; Burke stiffens in silent agony and crumples to his knees, mouth opening and shutting like a fish. Amy backs up, a neat march across the rug, her own wand still raised.

For a few moments she is deliriously happy with the anonymity, because she does not recognize the man, there is no electric feeling of enraged terror, she doesn’t look into his eyes and just know, and because a photograph is very different from real life, this continues for a few perilous seconds, until it sinks in. 

The man standing mere yards from her, tall and lean and dark-haired, his shoulders broader and his jaw more defined than she recalls, his hair done in a slightly different style, less boyish charm and more wealthy excess, is looking at her with a similar first glance of ‘who are you, again?’. It’s not real. They both know, of course they know, but knowing is different from understanding, and you can look at someone without really seeing them.

She was always so sure she’d just have to catch a glimpse of the back of his head, and she’d spot him a block away. Now she knows how foolish that was. He carries himself differently. The eyes are not the exact same ones she remembers. His mouth is a different sort of line now. His cheekbones are harsher, cutting against his pale skin. There is the barest hint of stubble on the right underside of his chin; he missed a spot while shaving and she only notices it because she stands barely higher than his shoulder; he is more than a head taller than her now. When she last knew him he couldn’t have dreamt of growing a beard or filling out a suit. She's been dreading seeing the boy again, but that boy is long gone, she realizes now. 

Burke’s low whine of pain interrupts this silent assessment. They both glance over at him. “Get up,” Tom says, and his voice is deeper, his accent different from what she knew- if she heard him over the telephone, would she recognize it? Burke, seemingly freed from his invisible bonds, struggles to his feet. “I warned you against using magic, Charles,” he says, like a sternly reproving father addressing a wayward son. “I thought I made myself very clear.”

Amy adjusts her grip on her wand; without looking back at her he holds out his left hand and crooks a finger; her wand shoots out of her grasp; she makes a jump for it, her fingers skim along the wood, and then it’s gone. Amy stumbles, but keeps her balance, exhales shakily, and stays where she is, hands balled up in fists at her sides.

“I- she-,” Burke is clearly searching for some sort of plausible excuse or explanation without revealing the Veritaserum's effects. “You said if-,”

“I said if it were absolutely necessary, a simple stunner would be acceptable.”

Amy imagines Burke sitting there next to her unconscious form and lets her revulsion show plainly, but no one’s looking at her. She glances around for something suitably heavy but light enough to throw, and grabs a thick bookend off a shelf, weighing it in the palm of her hand. Burke notices; his eyes widen, and Tom sighs curtly, turns on his heel, and the glossy ceramic bookend collapses into pebbles in her palm. They spill out onto the floor, one by one. 

“I’m not particularly interested in your excuses at the moment,” he tells Burke, examining Amy’s wand in his left hand. “We’ll discuss your performance later. Leave. I last saw your wife looking very animated in conversation with Hasan Shafiq by the bar. You might want to intervene before it’s plastered all over the society pages. He’s a bit closer to her age, if I recall.”

Burke leaves. Amy debates making a run for the door, but Tom is in her way. That’s familiar, at least. She gets her back against the bookshelf behind her instead. It feels more comfortable that way. They share another silent look. His double-breasted dinner jacket is midnight blue, just a few shades darker than her dress. The idea of them picking out similar colors to wear tonight aggravates her. His cuff-links are silver, unsurprisingly. His trousers are very well-tailored. He’s not wearing dress robes; she’s so used to seeing him the papers photographed in the red robes of the Wizengamot that it’s a little disconcerting.

He has yet to say a single word to her. She wonders if he’ll even bother. He doesn’t need to speak directly to her to probe inside her head. He appears to be waiting for some kind of outburst from her, as though they were in one of Mae’s over dramatic films. Some sort of variation on ‘you’ll never get away with this!’ or ‘you fiend!’ or ‘I’m not telling you anything, monster!’. Amy refuses to give him the satisfaction. She exhales again, fighting to keep her breathing calm. He is so much more real like this. He is so close. 

“You don’t look very sorry,” he says, after another moment.

“I’m not,” she breathes.

“And you’re not wearing your gloves,” he seems almost disappointed by this.

“They didn’t go with my dress.”

His dark eyes flicker over her appearance. Nothing. She can’t get a read on him. This used to be so easy. “That’s a pity. I had thought we might be able to do a bit of a gift exchange.”

He still has her wand. For a paralyzing moment she wonders what she’ll do if he snaps it in half. What that might feel like. It’s seen her through so much. Would that push her over the edge? She feels perilously close already. He’s always brought out the worst in her. She’d always assured herself she could handle this, that an inevitable reunion would see her steely, stoic, unrelenting, like a soldier staring down a firing squad. 

She feels a good deal more fragile than steel at the moment.

“You were so much more forthcoming the last time,” he smooths a hand across the top of Edgar Prince’s broad mahogany desk, as if inspecting for dust.

“We had more to talk about then,” she allows through her teeth.

“Funny, I don’t recall myself doing much talking.” His voice is so much crisper, more polished, than she remembers. Nothing like the boy who was always one or two annoyances away from dropping back into the near-Cockney they grew up with. “If I remember correctly, the conversation was almost entirely one-sided.”

She doesn’t know if this numbness is fear, dread, or something worse. “Well,” she says. “It’s not anymore, is it?”

He’s busy drawing up a chair beside the desk, not behind it. He sits down. “You can stay there,” he says, as if entertaining the whims of a tantruming toddler. “Whatever you’re more comfortable with.”

“That’s funny,” she says, “Burke didn’t seem all that concerned with my comfort.”

“Didn’t he?” Tom looks at her. “Oh no. Shall I kill him?” His tone edges towards mocking. “Whatever you like. Your wish is my command.”

“Stop it,” she says.

“Stop what? Humoring you?” The mocking lilt vanishes, folding itself up into something else, something colder and sharper. “Gladly. Look at where that got me.”

“I know why you’re here,” Amy presses her hot scalp back against the cold shelf. It’s comforting. Her face is flushed and her heart is pounding. “And it’s not so you could goad me into-,”

“Into what? An apology?” he asks sharply. “No, I didn’t think I was likely to get one, when I woke up vomiting up your little concoction on the side of the lake. Rest assured, I haven’t been holding out hope all these years.”

“If you knew where I was all along-,”

He ignores that, intent on making his point. “You think I came here to, what? Grind an apology out of you? _Oh, Tom, please forgive me. I panicked. It was too much_.” 

“You want the ring,” she all but barks. “Get to the point. Lucinda Amell will be worrying about me.”

“Yes, you were always good at that,” he says. “Getting people worried for you. One of your many talents. Abbott, Goldstein, Mishra, Amell, Dumbledore- the list just goes on and on.”

The fear that spikes through her chest then is jagged as a thorny stem. “This is between you and me.”

“You and I,” he corrects her grammar distantly. “That’s right. I’ll admit, you’ve played your part very well. But I think it’s time now. You can stop pretending at martyrdom in your corner over there. Yes, I see you. Poor, purloined Amy. With her war stories and her struggling clinic and her charming little girl-,”

The fear is replaced by something less thorny and more venomous. “No,” she actually strides forward, her voice cracking like a whip. “No, you leave her out of this- all of this-,”

“That’s funny,” he sneers back at her, and they could be sixteen again, squaring off between the library shelves. “Come on. Did you really think I’d be so taken in by your little insurance policy? It was very cleverly timed, I’ll give you that-,”

“My… what?” she chokes out around all his barbed words, flying at her face.

“How did you decide? Pick a muggle at random and slip them a love potion?” he jeers. “Fall into bed with O’Neill while he and Patsy were having a row? I suppose the right looks were all that mattered, when it came down to it. Would have been very inconvenient if she came out blonde!”

“You…” she stares at him, really stares. He is vehement but unflustered, utterly convinced but not enraged. He… he might honestly believe this fiction he’s created in his own head. “I wasn’t- when we were together…”

“Together,” he arches a brow. “That’s not how I would describe it. More of a long con, if anything. I’ll give you this. I was a fool. I wanted to be convinced.”

“She’s…”

“Just too convenient, isn’t it?” he says. “Too perfect. That was your mistake. Well, one of them. To think I would ever, for an instant, believe that you’d be sentimental enough to keep any part of me beyond what you could exploit. Come on now. No need to mince words. You can admit it.” He pushes himself out of his seat, balancing the fingers of one hand like a claw on the desk as he watches her almost hungrily for some sort of tearful confession or gleeful acknowledgement. 

“If it had been my child, you’d have flushed it out without a second thought. Anyone else’s would do, though. Your little life preserver to cling to when everything else finally caught up. I can see it in your eyes.”

“You…” 

“You know, once I wouldn’t have thought of you capable of it. Does she know? That you raised her up like a pig for the slaughter, trusting I’d hold off so long as you claimed she was mine?”

“You-,” she blinks back tears of rage. “You deranged, stupid bastard-,”

“It would be just like you to come to love the pig, though,” he acknowledges. “You always hated to chop up the chickens on the farm.”

It’s on the tip of her tongue, to correct him, to dare him to take a peek inside her and find out the truth. But she can’t. She won’t. Letting him assume just what he pleased worked so well for the last time round, how can she get in the way of it now? No. Maybe it’s better this way. Let him believe it for as long as possible. 

“If you want to hurt someone, hurt me,” she says instead, wiping at her eyes. “I’m right here, Tom. You’ve got what you wanted. It’s just us.”

“I haven’t begun to get what I want,” he snaps. “But let’s start small, shall we?”

The clock on the mantle chimes a quarter to midnight.

“Where is the ring?” 

She looks back at him, shaking with fury. “What do you need it for, Tom? You said it was just an heirloom. Gotten nostalgic in your old age?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself,” he says coldly.

“Or what?” she smiles back at him, all teeth. “You’re going to torture it out of me in Edgar Prince’s study? I don’t think so, Minister. It’s New Year’s Eve, and you’ve got loads of well wishers waiting outside.”

She feels his mind then, the barest prickle along her scalp. Amy closes her eyes, tries to picture that fork scraping around that same old plate, metal rasping against china. “Get away from me.”

She feels him pulls back, to her surprise. He’s hesitant, for some reason, and it’s certainly not out of concern for her. “There’s neater ways to do this,” he says, “and I’m losing patience.”

“Afraid of what you might see?” She opens her eyes again just in time to see the flash of something across his handsome face. Bingo. “Lost our patience and our nerve already, have we?” She dares to take a step forward. Her skill with wandless magic is… not much at all, but she’s got to try.

“I’m not a child to be stoked up into a rage by your petty insults anymore,” he says curtly. “You’ll tell me.”

“Will I, now?”

“It’d be a shame to ring in the new year with some tragic news, but these things happen,” he says. “If you need me to be brusque, I will. Did you send Matthew Abbott a Christmas card this year? I think we’ll start there. Accidents are so common in his line of work. It's a dangerous life aurors lead, isn’t it?”

“A trained auror isn’t as easy pickings as a household of defenceless muggles, Tom,” she retorts, fighting back the panic. “Don’t overrate yourself.”

“How considerate of you,” he all but hisses. “You’re right, Amy. Let’s scale back. I imagine arithmancers are somewhat less paranoid when it comes to their personal security.”

She thinks of Vera and her husband and sons, gathered around their dinner table, saying a blessing before their meal. “You can hardly trust your own neighbors, these days,” he’s saying. “Break-ins are just so common. In fact, I’m proposing several exciting new security measures in the Wizengamot tomorrow. Does she like to listen to the radio, your M-,”

“Accio!” she thrusts her hand out and her wand skirts out of his fingers, before clattering to the floor between them.

They both look at it, then he flicks his own wand as she rips a heavy tome from the shelf and hurls it at his head with chaser-like accuracy. She was always a great shooter. She lunges for her wand as he slows the large book to a crawl in mid air, then scrambles out of the way as it slams to the floor beside her. Amy clambers back to her feet, wand raised.

“I don’t think you really want to do this,” he says, even as they circle, a controlled orbit around the room. 

“Neither do you,” she snarls.

The clock chimes five to midnight.

He inclines his head. “I can see you’re feeling overwhelmed. Understandable. Let’s come back to this at a later date.” As if they’re rescheduling a business meeting.

“There won’t be one,” she says, brimming with vile false confidence. It feels better than grasping at nothing.

He carries on as if he hadn’t heard her. “How does the eleventh sound? That seems reasonable to me. More than enough time for you to sort out your priorities.”

“If you hurt anyone even in the loosest sense connected to me,” she says, “I will destroy it and mail you the pieces.”

“One would think you’d be a better liar- you’ve had so much practice,” he retorts with a thin smile.

There’s footsteps in the hall outside, the sound of muffled, giggly voices. Some couple looking for a place to duck into. Amy’s very familiar with that. Tom turns towards the door, visibly annoyed, and despite wanting to believe he’s smarter than this, she feels a stab of unease. The truth is, she has no idea what he might do, and she has a very good idea of what he’s capable of. “Don’t,” she says quickly, as if to warn him off. He hasn’t lowered his wand. “Don’t, please-,”

The voices draw closer. He pockets his wand and motions her towards the door. She hears the lock click open. “I can’t thank you enough for making the time to speak with me, Miss Benson,” he says, as Amy stows her wand away and the door haltingly swings open to reveal a giddy Colin Montague and some young witch she doesn’t immediately recognize in this lighting; another student of hers, no doubt. They’re just children. _They_ used to be just children. 

They stop, guiltily hurrying out of the way as she walks stiffly out, followed by a calm, smiling Tom. “It’s been so enlightening to hear directly from a professor herself,” he says. “Education remains one of our top priorities. Mr. Montague,” he nods to young Colin, who looks tipsy and starstruck, “Miss Travers.” Elaine Travers, a fifth year, gives a little giddy gasp at being recognized, backing up against the wall, a manicured hand over her mouth. She’s young enough to still wear a glittering charm bracelet around her wrist. 

Amy looks at the two of them, then feels her breath hitch in her throat when Tom reaches over and shakes her hand. He seems to regret it as soon as their bare hands touch, and lets go as if stung, although still smiling that photo-worthy, unruffled politician’s smile. “Have a wonderful new year,” he says. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other very soon.”

Colin Montague and Elaine Travers, undeterred, skirt inside the now empty study, whispering and giggling to each other; the door clunks shut behind them. Tom pauses in the dark corridor to look at her a moment longer. Amy looks back at him, and then, as he starts to turn and saunter off, says clearly and so very coldly it feels like it numbs her lips to say it, “Happy birthday, Tom.” Her implication is clear. Enjoy this while it lasts.

He takes a slight step back, eyes narrowed, then turns and goes. 

Nearby, muffled voices are beginning to chant the countdown. Amy slumps against the wall, then slams a fist into the wood paneling with a satisfying _thunk_. More muffled laughter from inside the study; a girl squeals. She shakes out her fist, raises it to her clammy face, as if to make sure she’s still here, breathing, standing, feeling. Then she strides in the opposite direction, in search of the nearest exit, and comes out onto the grand terrace just as the gathered crowd roars “THREE! TWO! ONE!”

“Amy!” Lucinda Amell takes her arm, drink in hand, smiling broadly as the dark sky explodes in red and green and purple lights. “There you are! What happened, did you fall in?”

Amy carries on as if she hadn’t heard her, turning her face up to the sky, watching a massive emerald serpent twist and dance against the velvet backdrop of the clouds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. This is what I meant when I said 'this is the first of several confrontations'. Like any good office worker, Tom long ago learned the importance of sending that follow-up email!
> 
> 2\. Ew, Burke. Don't touch people's hair. To someone like Charles Burke, he actually considers halfbloods more offensive to pureblood ideals than muggleborns, because the idea of a witch or wizard producing offspring with a muggle disgusts him. 
> 
> 3\. Much like how Tom refuses to refer to Amy by her name in his POV chapter, here we see Amy distancing herself by initially only calling him 'the man' when he first comes into the room. Only when she hears him speak does she identify him as Tom. 
> 
> 4\. If Tom seemed fairly tolerant of Burke's... mishaps that's very much because this is Amy's POV. Trust me, Charles is in for a very rough week.
> 
> 5\. "You don't look very sorry," is Tom's snide reference to Amy's last words to him being an apology. Clearly seeing one another in the flesh again is bringing out the angry teens in both of them. 
> 
> 6\. I initially intended to divide the chapter between their POVs, but it was too disjointed and it is honestly difficult for me to slip from Amy's voice to Tom's so close together. They have very different mannerisms and narratives in my head. Because this is all Amy's POV, I would not call this a 100% accurate dissection of Tom's beliefs, motives, and moods. Much like how Amy references about how Veritaserum is more about other people's perceptions of the world, not necessarily the facts, so is any POV chapter in this fic. Tom is believing what he wants and assigning motives as he pleases, and so is she.
> 
> 7\. "Someone get these two on Maury!" I think there is something very interesting and almost self-loathing about Tom's insistence to Amy that she would never willingly have his child, so it *must* be a desperate ploy to possibly appease him at the last moment. It says more about how he sees himself than about how he sees her. 
> 
> 8\. This chapter was a thin line between keeping Tom's menace as a villain and not portraying Amy as a helpless waif cowering in a corner. That said, I'd forgotten how much I enjoy writing these two interacting. In some sense, they really have not changed much at all in how they handle one another. 
> 
> 9\. Next chapter will be from Tom's POV, and we will be seeing a very familiar setting from Barbed Wire!
> 
> 10\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com).


	16. Tom II

LONDON, JANUARY 1958

His old bedroom at Wool’s seems just as cramped and uncomfortable in this dream as it ever was in reality. Most of Tom’s dreams- he doesn’t count the nightmares- tend to veer towards the lucid, and so he’s grown accustomed to a certain degree of control over his surroundings. He feels the box-springs of the small bed, barely more than a cot, and hard as slate, creak under his weight. Curiously enough, he is not a child this time, but in his late teens, judging by his body, trapped in the middle of a growth spurt, all long limbs and narrow shoulders. 

He looks around. Outside his grimy, narrow window looms the nighttime London of a decade past, utterly shuttered and pitch black, bracing for yet another bombing. His childhood bedroom, if it can even be called that, and not a cell, is more or less as he remembers it. There are those same neat stacks of books on his tiny desk, his shoes tucked under the chair, laces stuffed inside. His bed is still made, despite the obvious late hour. The room should be too dark to see readily in, but his vision is just fine. There’s a cloying layer of dust across the floor; it’s slick under his bare feet. He stands up in disgust and dismay, repressing a shudder against the sudden draft. The wind rattles against his window.

There’s a knock at the door, ringing out hollowly and too loud, given the dead silence of the room. Tom opens his mouth, but before he can permit or refuse an entrance the door’s swung open, and she comes in, closing it behind her, with a blazing, fiery sort of look in her pale eyes. This is the same girl who populates many of his most treasured and hated memories. Her stringy, mousy hair is disheveled, falling in her face, and she’s wearing a long nightgown. Wracked with shivers from the cold, she almost looks as though her teeth were chattering.

“Where is it?” she demands shrilly, looking like she’d come running up the stairs, panting and flushed as she is, although he would have heard her. But this is a dream, and things don’t need to make sense. “Where is it, Tom?!” She takes an almost threatening step towards him, although it’s obvious she’s wandless- now that he thinks of it, he has no idea where his is, either. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, but it comes across less smoothly than he would have liked. He sounds young and boyish to his adult ears; his voice hasn’t dropped all the way yet, it’s higher, reedier, his accent more coarse than he’d tolerate now. 

Her hands are balled up into shaking fists, and he smiles mockingly- is she going to take a swing at him in his own dream?- but then she whirls around, facing the dark wardrobe in the corner. He hadn’t paid it much mind before, but now he feels a horrible sense of dread. “Don’t,” he says, lunging forward and grasping her by the arm. “Tell me what you’re looking for- tell me what you want, but don’t go in there, Amy-,” To his shock, she manages to wrench away easily, brushing him off as though he had no substance at all.

“Don’t!” 

She yanks open the doors, then gasps and recoils. Tom stares past her at a small bundled lump sitting in the bottom of the wardrobe, alongside all the other childhood toys and knickknacks he’d picked up over the years, and thinks in disgust, _the fucking rabbit_. Of course. Of course he’d dream of this now. Twenty three years pass without so much as an errant thought about Billy Stubbs’ stupid, flea-ridden little pet, and now it’s being flung back in his face. He blames her for this. She’s dragged it up somehow, coaxed it out of him with her presence, as always. 

“I told you it was an accident,” he says sharply, but she’s not reacting as she did back then, this is all wrong- they weren’t sixteen when it happened, they were eight or nine, he can’t remember, and it wasn’t like this. 

She’s sunk down onto her haunches, her head in hands, and he can barely hear her muffled, “No, it wasn’t.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” he says, stepping past her to examine the bundle more closely. He stops short. Up close, it is too large by far to be a rabbit. He glimpses the barest hint of dark hair peeking out from the heavy winter scarf wrapped around it like a burial shroud. There is a sudden strange lump in his throat; his breathing quickens.

“Amy,” he says, quickly, turning back to her, “Amy, I never-,”

She raises her head to look at him; tears are streaming down her swollen red face, and her expression is crumpled in an agony that is entirely unfamiliar to him. He can’t remember the last time he saw her cry like this. He’s not sure if she ever really has. But this is just a dream. It’s not real. He didn’t do it. She makes a low, guttural sort of moaning noise and scrambles backwards and away from him, like a crab, until her back collides with the side of the bed. 

He crouches down, placating, pleading, lying. Why is he lying? “It wasn’t me, I didn’t do it-,”

“Get away from me,” she says, sobbing, “get away from me, get away from me- I hate you, I HATE YOU-,”

“I didn’t mean to,” he reaches for her. “I didn’t mean to, I just-,”

She draws her knees up to her chest and buries her face against them, flinching away when he tries to pull her to him. He tries to take her hand instead, tugging it away from her knees; it’s shaking violently and so hot she must be feverish. Behind him, the wardrobe begins to rattle and shake, before bursting into crackling flames. He feels a surge of terror he has not felt since he was very young and very alone. 

Desperate, he struggles to his feet, heaving her up along with him. They need to get away from here. He can help her get away from here. She just has to listen, and trust him again. He’ll prove to her it wasn’t him, or that it was an accident. He can make her believe again. He can make her stay this time. It’s not too late. She’s fighting violently against him, trying to reach the burning wardrobe and the small, broken body wrapped in a boy’s scarf inside. He won’t let her; she’ll only hurt herself. He wraps an arm around her heaving middle to better restrain her, and she begins to properly scream, kicking and scratching and wailing. 

Some of her hair gets in his mouth; the back of her skull collides solidly with his nose, and he feels a dull burst of pain and a rush of warm blood. It drips down onto her scalp as she continues to flail and fight him, but he’s stronger than her, and he is gradually able to drag her towards the door, ignoring the skid-marks left on the dusty, freezing floors by their feet. He bites back an exhale of relief as they reach it; they’re almost free of this place. But when he puts his hand to the doorknob, it burns and burns against his palm, branding its outline into his skin, the way a child’s marble once melted with a sizzle and pop.

He shouts in pain, and she jerks free of him, pressed up flush against the ugly grey wall. He can see the fire of the wardrobe reflected in her eyes, and beyond that, not terror or horror but a deep, unabiding hatred. He’s never seen that look on her before, not really. It’s different from anger or fury, separate from loathing. It leaves him more breathless than the searing agony in his hand. “I didn’t mean for this,” he says raggedly, as she holds out her hands as if to ward him off. “You know I didn’t.” He swallows. “I won’t do it again. I promise, this time. I swear it, Amy. I won’t do it again.”

Good, he wants her to say, to soften, to trust him, but she just shakes her head mutely, lips pressed together in an unforgiving snarl. He reaches for her again, but loses his footing on the dusty floor and finds himself toppling over, only he goes straight through the wood, and wakes up on his sofa in the London townhouse with a barely restrained yelp. The clock on the mantle is tolling half past ten. The night of January 11th is almost over. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and it’s very rare that he would after just sitting down, but he only got home at half past eight, and after eating his first and only meal of the day, promptly nodded off, it would seem. 

He dislikes that; it feels like a reminder of age, that though he may still be in the prime of his life, he doesn’t have the endless, almost frenetic energy he had when he was eighteen or nineteen or twenty, the ability to work through multiple nights and show up the next morning unruffled, stomach empty but leaden, completely unaffected by his habits. He examines his hand closely; it still sears with pain; his mind is playing tricks on him. Tom makes a clenched fist and then releases it; the burning sensation recedes. 

Perhaps the time of night should be giving him some kind of jolt of alarm, but once he convinces himself that he’s back in the realm of reality, all he feels is dull irritation. It’s typical of her to leave things to the last minute like this, banking on him being slow to retaliate, and it’s typical of her to invite herself into his dreams. What was that supposed to be? His subconscious rousing itself for the first time in years for an admonishing tut? Some sort of misplaced, unwarranted guilt? He has nothing to feel sorry for. 

Yes, leaving her alone with Burke was clearly a misjudgement on his part. It won’t happen again. He’d chosen Burke because he was all bark, no bite- or so Tom had thought. Burke would sit there and make snappish comments and sneer and condescend, and it would throw her off whatever little game she thought she was playing with him, and that would be it. He meant to unsettle her, keep her on her toes, not let Burke turn it into some ‘case-in-point’ for his personal convictions. How hard could it possibly be to sit there and simply watch her for half an hour while Tom made the rounds? 

Incredibly hard, apparently. He’d spent the early hours of the new year rifling through Burke’s mind, hungrily replaying the memories over and over again, growing more and more disgusted every time. The moron had played right into her hands from the moment he ordered her to serve him a drink. The obvious fact that she’d drugged him, likely with Veritaserum, had only enraged Tom more, although truthfully he would admit to being more upset with Charles than her. She was a scorpion; they stung when you picked them up. Burke should have known better; instead he’d convinced himself that a lowly muggleborn would never be able to get one over on him, and paid her price for it. 

The temptation to simply kill Burke had been strong, and Tom would be lying if he said he hadn’t considered it. Charles had blatantly disobeyed orders, put himself in a vulnerable position, threatened everything Tom had been working towards, and worst of all, he’d escalated things. He’d tried for an Unforgivable, and might have succeeded had Tom not walked in at that very moment. It was untenable. How was he supposed to trust someone who, when told to simply watch the gradually heating cauldron, instead began stoking up the fire under it until it boiled over?

But killing Burke would have brought in unnecessary attention; his family were rampant bureaucrats, the lot of them, and the wife was a Rowle by birth. The risk of offending two major pureblooded families wasn’t worth the reward. He’d settled for demonstrating the proper use of the Cruciatus curse in a situation where it was called for. Multiple times. It had taken longer than he would have liked to impart this lesson, but by the end of it he was feeling rather confident that Burke now understood the importance of using the correct tool at the correct time.

That said, the idea of the dream heralding the arrival of some sort of misbegotten guilt over the entire encounter was ludicrous. She’d lied to him, poisoned him, and stolen from him. No sooner had he entered the room than she’d hurled something at his head. She’d spent the entire time sneering and growling, goading him, as though he were still some little puppet who would dance on her command. Obviously he disapproved of Burke’s violent overtures, but it wasn’t as if she’d been injured. Not a scratch on her. She’d not even been rattled enough to hold her tongue for more than a few moments. 

And as for his threats, well- it was an efficient and effective method of getting what he wanted. Granted, perhaps he should have started with the daughter, but- his palm burns again, another figment of his imagination. This is absurd. At present he doesn’t intend to lay so much as a finger on the child. Why would he? She’s the most persuasive way of keeping her mother in check. It would be idiotic to do anything to jeopardize that. He can’t allow his personal feelings to sway him on the matter. Some addled muggle’s bastard child is no threat to him. And if she believes him inclined to hurt the girl, then she’s much more likely do what’s necessary to appease him. In a sense, she’s created her own trap, and it clearly doesn’t take much to trigger it.

He can still hear her sudden dip in tone when the Montague boy and the Travers girl interrupted them. All that growling ferocity replaced by frantic pleading. It’s pathetic. She can pretend at cold contempt and hardened spite all she likes, but underneath it all she’s still that same clawing, desperate little girl, who’d throw herself into danger without a thought for the sake of a principle or a person. That why he knows she’ll take heed. She might make him come to her, for the sake of her pride, but she will be there. He’d made his points very clear. She’ll bring him to the ring. Not all of his threats are idle ones. What sort of precedent would that set?

Still, she’s cutting it close. He’ll give her until the stroke of midnight, he decides, in the interest of fairness. After that, well, he can hardly be held responsible for what might happen, and the death of a heroic young auror is always guaranteed to raise the public’s perception of a strong-minded government. People love to posture about justice, but the truth is, for most the idea of vengeance is always much more satisfying. It feels better to get even than to take the high road from the start. They can all agree on that. 

He stands up, wincing at the numbness in his legs and feet from having fallen asleep in a seated position, and runs a hand through his slightly mussed hair. Lydia’s left a stack of papers concerning the numbers for the wedding in the corner, and a copy of her correspondence with Witch Weekly over the possibility of covering her bridal shower. She stopped by very quickly this morning before he announced he was going into the office, all aflutter over the final alterations for her gown. He’s sure his overall impassiveness towards their upcoming nuptials showed; he wasn’t in the mood to humor her as much as usual, but she made no note of it, breezing in and out on her way to the seamstress. 

He goes into the kitchen to get a cup of water, and goes for his wand instinctively when something smashes itself into the window overlooking the small garden. An owl hoots at him. Tom glares, glances at the cup levitating above the sink from his wordless spell, and lowers it back down, leaning forward to open the window. Unless she’s managed to find an animagus to assassinate him, he thinks it should be safe enough. He takes the proffered slip of parchment, ignoring the fact that the owl is clearly one of the school’s, and unfolds it, reading it quickly; it’s just an address.

Then he reads it again. The owl is rooting around near a cabinet, looking for treats, until the glass cup in the sink shatters abruptly, sending it flapping back out of the window in a panic.

The street is just as dull and dreary as he remembers, the park across the way closed up for ‘new construction’. At the end of one lane a brand new row of flats are being built up, tarps flapping in the wind. There’s far more parked cars than he recalls from when he was a child, and what was once a dentist’s office is now a floundering art gallery. There are still traces, if you look closely enough, of the air raids which once ravaged this entire block. An abandoned lot on one corner, completely roped off. A persistent crater in someone’s narrow garden. He did not have to focus very long to conjure up a street corner to apparate onto; he knows every loathsome inch of this area, still knows it very well, to his disgust. 

He’s casting spells under his breath all the while; if this is some harebrained plan for an ambush, she’s going to have to try a little harder. But he picks up nothing- no wards hastily erected, no runes on passing buildings or on the sidewalk, and his Homenum Revelio detects one sole figure out of doors on this bitterly cold winter night, and she is leaning against what were once the wrought iron front gates of Wool’s. Tom has not been on this street, standing in front of this bleak building for about fifteen years, but he’s not surprised to see the sign proclaiming it a ‘home for abandoned children’ replaced by one declaring it government property. Yet another old building hit during the Blitz and built back up into office blocks.

She’s struggling to light a cigarette when he approaches her; he’s never known her to smoke before. Then again, he’s never really known her at all, has he? At the sound of his footsteps she glances up briefly, and impassively returns her attention to her sputtering lighter. When that fails, she shoves it back into her navy blue corduroy jacket, and procures her wand. He tenses slightly, but doesn’t break his stride. She glances back up at him, gives a sardonic little smile, and lights her cigarette, then stows her wand away. 

He resists the urge to rip it out of her mouth and grind it to ashes underneath his heel. He’d anticipated her angry, flustered, and a little frightened. From the look on her face, she’s treating this more like an unpleasant but necessary errand. If she wants to pretend at bravery, it’s no concern of his. Let her have this, he thinks. What else has she got to look forward to? The wind rattles the gates, now chained shut. 

“Let’s get this over with,” she says coldly, as soon as he’s within hearing distance, and turns her attention to the gates. 

“Let me,” he says with a curt motion of his wand, and she has sense enough to still and take a step back, her hands in her pockets.

He unlocks the chains with a simple spell, and steps back himself as they rattle to an ungainly heap on the ground. Tom hesitates for a split second, feeling a dreadful, plummeting sensation, like he’s being dragged underwater, then pushes them open. They wail and groan, but neither of them are much concerned with the noise. He holds one gate open long enough for her to slip through after him, then lets the wind push it back shut with a clatter.

“I hope,” he says, now that they’re officially on this miserable property, “you brought me here for the right reasons, and not a little trip down memory lane.”

She just looks up at him with something like disdain for a moment, puffing on her cigarette, before removing it from her mouth. “You’ve gone and found me out, Tom,” she says bitterly. “There you have it- I sent you a note so we could take a tour of the old romping grounds. Well and truly cracked the case, you have. Congratulations.”

Her hair is bundled up under a scarf; she probably only has one or two good hats. He stares back at her, refusing to rise to her bait, and then says, “Show me.”

Where could she have tucked it away? In some drain pipe or under a loose brick? Did she go so far as to break into the building and hide it in the bottom of some filing cabinet, or under a floorboard? But instead of leading him towards the front doors, she treks around the side of the massive brick building, collecting more and more mud and slush on her heavy boots. Tom follows her in distaste, trying to tread more carefully, but also unwilling to let her out of his sight for even an instant. It would be just like her to lead him on a wild goose chase.

But she makes no sudden movements, only keeps walking steadily in front of him, not even looking back to check that he’s still following her. Her ability to keep her back to him for so long unnerves him. Does she really still have such a degree of trust in him, or is this just one last blast of bravado? Back behind the building, hemmed in by the high brick walls, it is colder and darker and wetter. He ignites a cool blue flame on his fingers, rubbed between his middle, pointer, and thumb, as he used to amuse himself with as a child.

“Nice to see your party tricks haven’t changed much,” she says, as they near that awful little wooden shed. 

He stops. “You didn’t.” It is caught between a threat and grim acceptance.

“I did,” she admits, shrugging her shoulders, and finally stubbing out that stupid cigarette. “Should I dig, or you?”

Wordlessly, he flicks his wand at the shed. The doors crash open. 

“You,” he says, with no lack of venom.

She could easily refute this and simply tunnel into the hard ground with her wand; instead she stomps past him to the shed, drags out a shovel that must be older than both of them combined, and puts the spade to the earth. If she buried it here, that must have been six months ago, when she first returned to Britain, because he can’t detect any freshly turned soil. He watches her grit her teeth and press all her weight down to break through the hard top layer; she seems more liable to break the shovel than the earth.

Slowly, gradually, she begins to make progress; her scarf coming askew to reveal more of her hair, grunting and panting with every yank of soil up from the small hole emerging out of the ground. He watches her in stony silence, trying to take some small measure of pleasure from this, but all he feels is fury. How dare she. How dare she bring him back here, how dare she make them unearth this, how dare she use some wretched memory from their childhood against him. 

He wishes the rabbit were alive so he could kill it again, and this time make her watch. He remembers looking at her, cradling its corpse like a baby doll, crooning under her breath at a dead sack of meat. It was revolting. He could not look away. He had never known anyone to meet something monstrous with tenderness before. It disturbed him greatly. It made him feel- It made him feel hopeful. He doesn’t know why. They were much closer after that. She didn’t tell. He’d been prepared to cajole, threaten, and terrify but she didn’t tell. She didn’t want him sent away. That had to mean something, he’d convinced himself. No one wanted him. But she did, even he did something bad, even when he refused to apologize for it. 

He wonders when she began to hate him. He would never admit it but eventually, by the time they were perhaps twelve or thirteen, he’d begun to wish she hadn’t gotten her letter, or that- Not that she was a muggle, but that he could have just- that he would not have had to share her with the rest of the world. That it could have just been the two of them. He would never wish her magic stripped from her, but sometimes it seemed as though she barely took notice of it, as if it didn’t matter to her at all, as though she believed she’d be the same exact person without a wand. 

It was delusional. One’s abilities shape their character. Does she think he would have ever paid her a moment’s notice had she not shown him what she could do? Shown him that she was special, worthy, like him? For years up until that dreary day when Dumbledore came he had mapped out their lives for them, operating under the belief that they were the only ones, that there were no others, that they might as well have been the only fully functional human beings in the entire world, surrounded by weak automatons. He would win a scholarship to a very good preparatory school and he would go on to one of the old universities and he would bring her with him and they would carve out a life for themselves, independent of the rest of the dull, mundane, ugly world. 

He would become someone great, an academic or a doctor or a politician, and he would do great things for them, things that mattered, and she would be with him and she would love him and they would be together always and they would share their magic with one another endlessly in a constant flow of ideas and feats and terrors and he would be happy. He would be happy, and that would be the very least the world owed him for the beginning it had inflicted on him. He would be happy, and powerful, and loved, and feared, and those feelings would never end. 

Hogwarts made him who he is today. But it also made her who she is, and he was never entirely satisfied with that, from the moment the hat roared HUFFLEPUFF when it sat upon her head. Had she been a Smith or a Taylor, she would have gone to Slytherin with him, she would have never chosen to be separated, and everything would be very, very different today. Her breath is misting in a small cloud in front of her; a piece of hair is falling into her eyes. She stops digging and throws down the shovel. He straightens in anticipation, almost locking his knees for an instant. 

She kneels down without a care for her trousers, tucked into her filthy boots, and begins to root around in the hole. He glimpses old bones turned over in the moonlight. His nose stings from the cold; he puts a thumb to it and comes away with a bead of blood. He smears it across his palm and watches as her gloved hand closes around something. These gloves are not white; they’re dark brown or black, utilitarian, more like men’s gloves than anything else. Slowly, so slowly, she stands back up, one fist clenched. 

He looks at her; she is staring him with an odd expression, almost shame, but not for herself. 

He holds out his hand; her upper lip curls in contempt. “Shall I put it on your finger, too?” she spits out, then presses something hard and small and metal into his palm.

Tom looks down at the ring with such a sensation of relief it almost makes him feel slightly faint. Wordlessly, he slides it onto his finger. He feels nothing, as he should. No one’s ever felt their own soul, no more than they could feel every breath they take or every beat of their heart. You couldn’t feel part of your soul anymore than you could feel your eyes resting in your skull or your brain firing off electrical impulses to the rest of your system. He feels nothing from it, and that is good. Murmuring under his breath, he probes at it with his wand once, twice, testing for any curses or spells upon it, and so only sees the shovel swinging at his head out of the corner of his eye.

“Protego!” Usually he wouldn’t even have to vocalize a shield charm, but she caught him off-guard. He reels back for a moment, almost stunned by her gall, then forces his hand through his shimmering pale green shield in order to grab the wooden handle of the shovel as she comes at him with it again. Had it taken him a second longer to react, she’d have dashed his bloody brains out with it, or at least given him a nasty concussion. She lets go of the shovel, comes up with her wand, until the force of his next furiously muttered spell sends her sprawling in the dirt, her wand rolling away from her. She tries to lunge for it, winded and gasping as she is, but he snaps his fingers and her legs lock together. Her wand floats up in the air, rotating gently.

He looks down at her angrily; she’s covered in loose, damp dirt and her scarf has come undone entirely, hanging around her neck. He feels the ring settle further onto his finger; confident it’s not about to slide off, he lowers his hands, both of them. “Brute force was always more your style, was it?” he sneers at her; she glares up at him in defiance, her nose crinkled and brows furrowed in fury. “Bad form. Did they teach you to bludgeon people to death in your time abroad, or did you pick that up from one of your more disreputable friends?”

He crouches down so they can speak more easily. “When I find Jaime Isola,” he tells her with a small, ‘this will be our secret’ smile, “he’s going to wish he’d never met you.”

Her jaw moves like she might spit in his face; he leans back slightly so he’s out of range. “Was this really so difficult for you?” he asks in a slightly calmer tone. “Was it so hard, to just do as you were told? I kept my word, didn’t I? I haven’t harmed a hair on anyone’s head- least of all yours.”

“Don’t think I don’t know what’s coming,” she says. “Don’t condescend to me. I know you, Tom. I know the way you work. The vile, ugly people you surround yourself with.” He can see her straining to break the leg-lock jinx, but no amount of clawing at herself is going to fix that. 

“And now she’s a prophet, to boot,” he drawls. “Do your ever tire of telling me what I’m thinking at any given moment? Or is that still one of your fonder pursuits?”

“I feel nothing fond when I think of you,” she says. 

“That makes two of us.” He stands back up, looming over her. He finds he almost enjoys it. It feels nice, to have her hanging on his every word. “Why don’t you tell me what I ought to do with someone who just tried to crack my skull open? Or is that one too difficult for you?”

“Fuck off,” she breathes at him. “And get it over with.”

“Get what over with?” he presses, although he knows, of course he does. She is angry and spiteful but he knows fear by now, and he can practically feel it roiling off her. She is afraid. This is one of the very few times he has ever sensed her fear around him. He ought to get more used to it. She’s the one who made it this way. 

She looks up at him for another silent moment, then says, “I want to remind you of something, first.” She sounds almost stern. Does she think she’s going to play the severe school teacher with him, berate him into getting down on bended knee and offering her a thousand apologies?

“Go right ahead,” he says coldly.

She swallows fiercely, then says, “I lied to you. I stole from you. I tricked you and I threatened you and I ran away. But you know- I know you must know, the way I used to feel for you.”

Used to. As though it were really a lifetime ago. He feels very cold, so cold it’s burning him. 

“I loved you,” she says. “Once. You know it wasn’t all an act. You must know. You’re not that bloody stubborn, Tom. You have to admit it. You know that once I did care for you. I saved your life. When we were little kids and you found the cave, and we fell in the water- you were drowning. I saved you. I brought you back up for air. And I never- not once, never, did I ever sell you out to Dumbledore, or any of the other professors. Even when you opened the Chamber. Never. You know this. You know I was so loyal, then. Alright?” She sounds as if she’s trying to break this down for a small child to understand, to spell it out for him. “So you owe me, at least a little bit-,”

“I owe you nothing,” he hisses. “I owe you _nothing_ , and you will never-,”

“Listen to me!” She almost shouts it. “Just- _listen_! I’ll tell you what you do owe me, still. When I am dead, this is done. It’s over. You have the ring. You don’t need to do anything else. You don’t need to hurt anyone else. Alright, Tom? My- my daughter means nothing to you. You leave her be. I’ll be gone, and you- you have what you wanted, and that will be it. You leave it alone. You leave my friends alone. You go on with your life, and you- you do not take anything else from me, once I’m dead.”

“Once you’re dead,” he echoes her.

“Let me up,” she closes her eyes for a moment, as if fighting back tears, but when she opens them they are stony and dry. “Damn it- just let me stand up, Tom. I’m not dying sprawled out on the dirt.”

He releases the jinx. She exhales and clambers to her feet, brushing dirt off her coat, yanking her silken scarf out from around her neck. It hangs limply in her right hand. She squares her shoulders and faces him head-on. He looks at her almost curiously. He wants her to suffer and he’d quite like to hurt her but he isn’t sure how to do that just now. It is difficult to explain but he feels more for her in this instant, not less. It’s no wave of fond forgiveness and he would not call it love but it is a sort of need. He was never going to kill her- the idea is laughable, why would he kill her, why would he reward her leaving with… letting her leave him again? 

If she went into this night feeling rather bravely that she would die a heroic, stubborn death after making one last earnest speech, like some sort of Joan of Arc or deposed monarch on her way to the guillotine, he supposes he can let her harbor that delusion for a few more moments. In the meantime, he studies her; the shadows underneath her eyes, the tendrils of her hair around her rounded face, her chapped nose and lips, the set of her jaw. “Get on with it,” she says, offended by his lack of movement. 

He moves forward and kisses her, one hand coming up to cup the back of her head. For an instant he thinks he feels slick blood there but that’s not real, it’s a remnant from his dream. It feels odd to kiss someone so familiar after so long. For a moment he might as well have pressed his mouth to cold stone, and then she moves in response against him, one hand gripping his left shoulder, rising up on her tiptoes, her mouth opening slightly, he imagines in some kind of acceptance of this-,

There is a searing pain in his lower lip and his mouth fills up with blood, rapidly. He lets go, jerking away from her with a grunt, and she slaps him, hard, across the face, like they were a couple of teenagers in a petty spat. She looks a little shocked at herself, perhaps wondering why she didn’t try to go for her wand. His cheek stings and burns. He wipes away some of the blood and saliva, shakes his head a little in mute surprise. 

“No,” she snaps, as if scolding an unruly dog. She looks more infuriated than frightened. “No. Do not toy with me. Finish it.”

“We’re not finished,” he says, when he can form words without wanting to strangle her or kiss her again. His tongue worms around inside his mouth, all copper. He should be enraged. He should make her pay for this. She is the only person to ever raise a hand to him. He should hit her back, hex her, curse her.

“I am not going to- to absolve you, somehow, to make this easier for you-,” she’s babbling. She felt something, then. Not love, obviously, but something. Good. She’s ashamed. He can tell. She’s ashamed, and not just of him. 

“We’re not finished,” he says. “Why would I let you pick your grave?” He swallows again, feels the blood slide down his throat like medicine. “You’re right. I owe you a little more still, and you owe me quite a lot. So we are not finished. And you have no one but yourself to blame for that. You’re going to go home, and you’re going to owe me a favor.”

“ _No_ ,” she says.

“Yes,” he’s not interested in yet another debate with her. “You’re going to owe me a favor. And if you decide you don’t owe me my favor, I am going to demonstrate to you, in vivid detail, just how wrong you are. You and I both know what it’s like to grow up young and motherless, but I don’t think you want to find out what it’s like to grow old and childless.”

She turns slightly from him as if he’d struck her back. He supposes he has, in a sense. “I hate you,” she says, when she turns back around, and her voice is hard and flat in defeat. “I _hate_ you. Do you understand? Don’t you ever put your hands on me like that again. I’ll rip your tongue out with my teeth.”

He believes her. 

His lip is still bleeding. He smiles through it, and ignores the sense that the heart of Wool’s is somewhere behind them, pulsing still, rejuvenated by their very presence. He ignores the eyes he feels on him, as though the building’s windows were all watching his every move. This was his prison, but it’s not anymore. She was another prison for him, but she’s not anymore. He can think her name and not feel as though the walls were closing in. Amy, he thinks, vindictively reclaiming it for himself. Amy. 

He touches the ring instinctively, reassured by its cold metal. “Thank you,” he says. “This has been very productive for both of us, Amy. You’ll be seeing me.” He hopes so. He hopes she does. He hopes she dreams of him, and that it is every bit as painful as when he dreams of her. He hopes it feels like falling, still. He wipes at his mouth again. She won’t look at him anymore. That’s a first. Maybe she’s afraid of what he’ll see. “Good night,” he says, in a gentler tone. Her wand falls to the ground. Before she can get the chance to snatch it back up, he’s apparated away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Boy are we earning that M rating with this chapter, huh? To be honest I think Tom is at his absolute scariest when we're just... inside his head with him seeing the way he views the world and the people around him. Not to say that there won't be some violent scenes in this fic, but I think the nature of Tom's character is more-so frightening in how he considers certain things and not specifically in what he actually ends up doing. 
> 
> 2\. Tom clearly never took those Divination lessons on interpreting dreams. I'm not sure if people remember it or not but this chapter is rife with references to the gruesome fate of poor Charlie the rabbit from Chapter 2 of BW. Tom's nightmare literally transports him back to his childhood, and his brain replaces the imagery of a dead animal with a dead child. Also, that awful burning wardrobe from canon. Of course, he's unwilling to acknowledge any of this beyond going 'hey, fuck you subconscious! get of here with this 'guilt' shit!'. 
> 
> 3\. Tom's trust that Amy will lead him to the ring on the designated date lies in the fact that he's realized she's still very much concerned about other people and that yes, threatening people she cares about does seem to motivate her to do what he wants. The fact that he does not actually intend to go through his with his threat to kill Mae is an entirely separate issue; he openly acknowledges that killing Mae would be a misstep on his part, not because it is obviously wrong to harm an innocent child, but because if Mae were out of the picture, it's safe to say Amy might feel she has little left to lose and try to take him down with her.
> 
> 4\. He dances around the subject of Burke's mistreatment of Amy; on the one hand claiming that he didn't know Burke was going to actually escalate things to such a degree, on the other hand defensively adding that it's not like Amy was seriously injured and that it's Burke's own fault for falling for her tricks in the first place. Then again, we see him seriously consider killing Burke for this (although Tom claims to himself that has nothing to do with Amy and is just about Charles disobeying him) and then settle for torturing him in punishment. 
> 
> 5\. Some of you did in fact guess correctly about Wool's, but then went 'but why would Tom ever willingly go back there?' Well, now we see what might force his hand! He obviously has so much more hatred and dread of Wool's, even as an adult man, than Amy ever had during her time there, and he takes the idea of her hiding his ring there as a blatant slap in the face. 
> 
> 6\. Amy usually only smokes cigarettes once a year at New Year's for some stress relief, but desperate times!
> 
> 7\. Some very weird wedding imagery/references here; the entire concept of one partner giving another a ring, one person kneeling down to offer another a ring, the entire idea of a soul or soul mates, and the attempted kiss before the altar of a dead rabbit. Pretty fucked up, but then again, we're in Tom's sad, scary little world in this chapter.
> 
> 8\. We never actually see in canon what it feels like for the creator of a horcrux to really come in contact with that horcrux, but I like the idea of not being able to 'feel' your own soul. 
> 
> 9\. "Did Amy just try to bash his brains out with a shovel?" After all those years of Herbology, it might as well be a weapon of choice for her.
> 
> 10\. "Is that it? Did she seriously just give him back the ring? This seems too easy." Yeah, it does seem a little suspicious, huh? 
> 
> 11\. Knowing how much he values personal loyalty, Amy tries to deliver what she thinks may be one last appeal to Tom in terms he can understand and appreciate, reminding him that whatever he thinks of her now, he must know she could never have faked her feelings for him for years on end, and that she's saved his bacon more than once, often through her silence. Because of this, she essentially argues, he may feel justified in killing her, but he shouldn't have any cause to hurt anyone else connected to her after she's dead.
> 
> 12\. Obviously we know that Tom seems to have no intention of killing Amy; he almost childishly feels that it would be 'letting her run away again' to kill her. Also, it takes a special kind of delusional to try for a kiss with someone who thinks you're about to kill them, and then actually wonder if they might happily reciprocate this kiss. That said, Amy's been waiting to haul off and slap the shit out of him for like 15 years, so I'm glad she got to have that.
> 
> 13\. As always you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com).


	17. Mae VI

HOGWARTS, FEBRUARY 1958

Mae supposes she really ought to get this investigation under way when Mum snaps on John Amory in the middle of Potions. John Amory is one of those boys who thinks Potions is pretty much on par with Home Economics. Mae hadn’t any idea what Home Economics was until Valerie explained that it’s like cooking and cleaning and housework, only you get graded on it, and usually boys don’t have to bother with it, because it’s not their responsibility to manage a household. 

She could have done without Valerie’s lengthy explanation, which got a bit heated towards the end, as Alec Carstairs interjected to say he didn’t see what was wrong with that, girls did the sewing and washing up and boys had to help their dads fix things around the house, and Valerie rounded on him and said he was a pig if he intended to get married some day and only ‘fix things once in a while’ while his wife slaved away cooking and cleaning and changing nappies-

The slight on Alec’s honor aside, Mae is really quite pleased when she realizes Mum has overhead John Amory’s latest snide comment about how useless this potion they’re brewing is, because she quite likes watching Mum go off on people. Well, she’d expected Mum to get snappish and really put him in his place with a good scolding. Instead she pretty much explodes. Mae hasn’t seen her this angry since she tried to sneak out using the Floo Network that one time. Mum doesn’t curse or anything or call John Amory a pea-brained dolt, even though he is, but she does get very, very, loud.

“Oi Benson,” someone pulls on the back of her uniform skirt in the midst of awkward, giggly chatter that always follows in the aftermath of a teacher shouting at someone, “what, did Mummy have a lover’s quarrel with Finch, then?”

One of the prevailing rumors among the first years is that Mum has embarked on a passionate love affair with the Astronomy professor. Mae assumes this is because they’re both young-ish or at least not very old and always sit together and laugh and chat at lunch and dinner. Although this has been somewhat less frequent since they got back from the break, because Mum has been different since they got back from the break. Oh, she pretends nothing is wrong, but Mae can tell something is very, very wrong. She keeps getting all distracted and distant in the middle of conversations, she’s always got dark circles under her eyes, and she’s very, very, short-tempered. 

“Keep tugging on my skirt, Taggart,” she says, without turning round. “See what happens, yeah?”

“Ooh, I’m so scared-,”

Mae checks to make sure Mum is still brooding at her desk, furiously scribbling her comments on someone’s essay, then flings some salt she’s spilled a few minutes ago into Melvyn Taggart’s face over her shoulder. Hopefully he starts melting, like a slug.

“You got it in my eye!”

“Ooh, gonna cry, baby?” she sneers, having by now perfected the tone of spiteful indifference one’s got to use with these twelve year old boys. Marian sighs loudly beside her; it’s unclear if she’s more exasperated with Mae’s behavior or Taggart’s. Mae sometimes wonders how Marian gets on with life, when everything is so tiresome and exasperating for her. It’s as if she’s trying to will herself to mature as quickly as possible so she can get out of here and be a boring grown-up for the rest of her life.

Christine is partnered with Valerie in the table in front of them. Mae and Christine have had a strict ‘don’t talk to me, I won’t talk to you’ rule since they returned to school, which so far everyone has respected. True, Mae is sometimes tempted to put frogspawn in her bed or snails in her shoes, but Christine hasn’t bothered her, just ignored her, and it feels a bit unsporting to be the one to strike first. Besides, she’s a little worried about provoking Christine too much, if her dad is this famous hit wizard who’s reporting straight back to the Minister. 

What if Christine went home for Christmas and told her family all about, how Dumbledore and Mae’s mum are plotting against the new government or something? Mae doesn’t think she would, because then Christine would have to explain how she heard any of it in the first place, but she could always lie, she could make something up to make herself look good. And she’s a notorious snitch, everyone knows that, she’d be the first to crack under a hard look and someone asking in a very proper tone, “Now Christine, what have you been up to?”

Still, Mae hopes she hasn’t. She really, really hopes Christine hasn’t said anything. 

In proper detective fashion, she tries to examine what she already knows on the long walk from Potions to Defence. Firstly: Mum has always been very paranoid about ‘privacy’ and ‘safety’. Secondly: The offer to teach at Hogwarts was very sudden and Mum hid it and Mae’s letter from her for months, almost like she was frightened of something. Thirdly: Mum was worried about what might have happened to Professor Slughorn, who taught Potions before her. Fourthly: Mum thought the Minister of Magic might have something to do with it. 

Fifthly: Mum apparently know Tom Gaunt when she was in school with him. Sixthly: Slughorn did something to displease Gaunt, then ran away. Seventhly: Slughorn was a Knight of Walpurgis and the Minister also has something to do with that lot. Eighthly: Jaime Isola, who is sort of Mum’s friend, is wanted for murder and maybe other very serious crimes. Ninthly: Mum went to some fancy dress party for MESP and has been acting very odd ever since she came back. Tenthly: She brewed something for the party and used it there, or gave it to someone, because Mae went through her purse the next day while she was sleeping in. 

So what can she conclude from all that, Mae thinks, in her usual seat in Defence, as Professor Carmody drones on about the jinx they’ll be practicing today. Well, she can conclude that Mum’s definitely lying about loads of things. She knew the Minister in school! And not just ‘knew’ as in, knew of him- knew him like a friend or something! Why else would Dumbledore have been talking about it like that? And now she’s been acting all dodgy ever since he got elected. 

There’s too many possibilities to consider. Is she really some kind of criminal? Because that would be really cool. Or maybe she’s a spy of some sort. Even better. Mae could take over for her when she retires. Or maybe she’s got some dirt on the Minister, something bad he did back in school. Maybe they used to be friends when they were kids, and now they’re not, and Mum wants to make sure he doesn’t do anything bad again. 

Anyways, it’s got to be something like that, because Mum is an excellent person, and even if she is some secret criminal mastermind, she probably uses her powers for good. Like Robin Hood. Or some kind of heroic vigilante. You know, someone who the Authorities don’t like but who’s out there saving people anyways, like in Mae’s comics. The possibility of anything else frightens her, although she could never admit it. The idea of Mum being anything but the warm, sunny sort of bundle of a person she is- it just doesn’t make sense. She is not someone who lies unless she absolutely has to. She is not someone who speaks badly of people unless they’ve earned it. She hated to see Mae kill mice and rats and feed them to Fernanda- how could she ever hurt anyone? 

“Miss Benson,” Mae breaks out of her very thorough examinations to see that Carmody is standing beside her desk, and half the class is already up on their feet, wands out. “If you can’t find a partner, I’ll assign you one.”

Mae looks sharply for Marian or Valerie, but Marian’s paired with Christine, traitor, and Valerie’s paired with Malcolm. Maureen Byrd’s a no-go; she’s with Eddy Callender. On Fridays they always have Defence with the Slytherins. “Er,” says Mae, searching for someone who doesn’t look appalled at the thought of partnering up with her, because she tends to be a little… zealous in this class, but it’s too late.

“You’ll go with Bulstrode.” 

Ambrose Bulstrode shuffles over, looking tremendously displeased with this turn of events. The thing to know about Bulstrode, chiefly, is that he looks closer to fourteen than eleven or twelve; he’s got be at least five foot six already and puberty is hitting him like a freight train. The Slytherin team’s already got him as a reserve beater, he’s so big. In the small desks reserved for the first and second years he looks like a bear cub trying to sit in a doll’s chair. That shining head of strawberry blonde hair isn’t doing him any favors, either- it doesn’t work with the rest of him, abnormally shiny and silken compared to his big head and broad shoulders and awkwardly long limbs. 

Mae exhales through her nostrils. Bulstrode does similarly, only when he does that it makes him seem even more like an ox. She knows she’s not being very fair; Ambrose Bulstrode has never said or done anything nasty to her, and even if he’s from some snotty pureblood family he doesn’t go around looking like he thinks he’s too good for everyone else. They move to the back of the room and separate by the customary ten paces, wands level.

“I don’t want to do this,” he says, or whines, more like it.

“Then I’ll go first,” Mae is in no mood now. She’s completely lost her train of deduction from before and she feels that this is entirely the fault of him and Professor Carmody. Of course the one day this week when they’re not just sitting quietly and taking notes is the day when she really needs to think. She can feel her thoughts scurrying around inside her brain like mice sniffing out breadcrumbs. It’s too hot in this room, the windows all tightly closed against the flurrying snow outside. 

Bulstrode ignores her. “I can’t jinx you,” he says. “I’ll look like an ass.”

“Because I’m a girl?” Mae demands; some of Valerie’s indignation from earlier has rubbed off.

“Because you’re so… little,” he says in dismay, looking her diminutive stature up and down. She’s still waiting for that promised growth spurt. Mum says girls usually stop growing taller at fourteen. She’ll be twelve next month. She’s only got two years to catch up before people start calling her Pixie or Spriteling or something. “It’d be like if I shoved you over in the hall or hit you.”

“It would not,” she snaps. “You’re not using your hands, you’re using a wand. Don’t be such a little pissant.”

He reddens. “Don’t call me names.”

“If I call you more, will you jinx me?”

He doesn’t answer; Mae huffs, raises her wand; “Flipendo!” Her jinx peters out before it even reaches him, a shower of sparks across the floorboards. Someone nearby snickers; she usually lands every spell they learn in Defence on the very first try. She flushes. 

Bulstrode is laughing himself, so much that he can’t even properly respond. Well, second time’s the charm. “FLIPENDO!” she bellows, resisting the urge to stamp her feet and shriek, and the force of it doesn’t just shove him back, but sends him sprawling into a desk with a shout.

“MISS BENSON!” Carmody can bellow too, when you tick her off, and she sounds all the more Irish for it when she shouts, the way Mum sounds more Cockney when she’s heated. But she also can’t cross the room of startled and cheering first years fast enough; Bulstrode springs back up, rubbing at his shoulder with one big hand, and without even so much as a second’s hesitation, finally gets a jinx off. His Knockback doesn’t send Mae sprawling; it all but lifts her into the air; she skims across the top of a desk and into a cabinet, landing square on her bottom in shock, her entire skeleton rattled. 

They both wind up in Friday afternoon detention. Mum naturally gets wind of it and pops by Carmody’s classroom around four o’clock, looking harried. Mae has thus far evaded anything more serious than losing Ravenclaw house points. This time she hasn’t lost any points because Carmody says her entire house shouldn’t be punished for her stupidity. Mum pokes her head into the room. Professor Carmody is still at her desk, writing. Mae and Bulstrode are on opposite sides of the room, scowling at their desks. 

“Are you hurt?” It’s not clear if Mum’s talking to Mae or Bulstrode. He shifts awkwardly. Mae refuses to answer; she’s not, just a bit banged up, like she tripped down some steps.

“It wasn’t a brawl, if that’s what you heard,” Carmody says from her desk. “Bit of rough-housing and not a sliver of sense between the two of them.”

“She started it,” Bulstrode mutters.

“And you could have given her a concussion, so let’s not point fingers.” Carmody straightens, stands, chair scraping across the floor. “I’m taking them down to the library to shelve books until dinner. Unless you had any objections…” Her tone makes it pretty obvious that she’s not thrilled Mum is intruding on their detention. 

“Not at all,” Mum says, and gives Mae a look. “Watch yourself, young lady.”

She leaves quickly, before Mae can snap something after her and wind up in another detention, this time with her own mother.

Because it’s late afternoon and the beginning of the weekend, the cavernous library is nearly empty. Mae is looking forward to shelving books; it’s better than sitting in silence doing nothing, or writing lines, but she’s careful not to show it, in case Carmody changes her mind. Bulstrode looks miserable; Mae wonders if he’s ever even been in the library before. Rumor has it he’s flubbing Transfiguration, badly, and he probably got in heaps of trouble at home when their first term marks were sent out. Or maybe not. Maybe rich people don’t care about that sort of thing.

Madam Rutherford, the librarian, exiles them to some stacks in the back with a cart full of missorted and lately returned books. Mae has seen her shelving before; she just floats them up into the proper place with her wand. But wands aren’t allowed in detention, so it’s just her, Bulstrode, and the many, many wheeled ladders which glide on tracks across the smooth floor. 

“I’ll climb,” Mae says, before he can get a word in edgewise. 

The look Bulstrode gives her suggests that he feels slightly guilty about sending her flying and so isn’t willing to argue on this. Or maybe he just doesn’t like heights when he’s not on a broom. 

Their system ends up consisting of first sorting through the books by fiction, non-fiction, reference, or periodical, and then by alphabetical order. Then they begin shelving, Mae scurrying up the ladders one handed or with a book tucked under her chin or armpit, while Bulstrode checks the next one to see if it’s in the same row. Usually, it’s not, so they wind up doing a lot of walking, up and down the narrow winding iron-grated stairwells that lead into the balcony floor, back down again, in and out of various study chambers, and past the Restricted Section. 

Mae could have easily done the whole endeavor in silence, since that’s what she wanted in the first place- quiet, so she could think straight- but Bulstrode eventually cracks.

“I’m sorry I overdid the jinx,” he says, as she slides back down the ladder from her latest excursion. He is one of those people who can’t maintain eye contact while apologizing and who doesn’t even attempt to. 

“Fine,” says Mae, because she already has two separate rows going on with Mum and Christine and she doesn’t have time for a third rivalry with Ambrose Bulstrode. “I’m sorry I called you a pissant and flung you into a desk.”

He smiles, which is a little strange, because he doesn’t really have a smiley sort of face, but it makes him look his age for once, mostly because of the dimples. “It didn’t hurt that much. I got in a fight with Stephen Kowalski at quidditch practice before break, and he broke his broom over my head.”

“Oh. Good. That it didn’t hurt, I mean. Not that you got hit with a broom.” Mae holds her hand out for the next book, which is really a journal and belongs in the periodical section. Which gives her a very good idea. 

“I think that’s the last of the journals,” Ambrose says when it becomes clear Mae has stopped shelving things and instead actively searching through the school yearbooks and records. “What are you… doing?” He jumps out of the way as several heavy tomes crash to the floor beside him, swearing. 

“Look,” says Mae breathlessly, once she’s scrambled down from her perch. “I just need to look some things up really quickly, alright? Also,” she checks the nearest clock, “we still have another half hour of detention, and if we tell Rutherford we’re done, she’ll just give us more work. Do you want to dust shelves? Because I don’t.”

“Fine,” he says, taking a seat at the nearest narrow table in between bookshelves. Mae arranges the necessary books- if Mum and Gaunt were in the same year, then they both must have attended Hogwarts from ‘38 to ‘45- and then gets cracking, praying Rutherford or a prefect doesn’t happen to walk by at any moment. Maybe she should make Ambrose be a lookout, but she feels like she’s already pushing their newfound truce a little far.

As it turns out, yearbooks are put together by some very dull people, and as a result are always pretty dull, unless someone happened to die that year. Unfortunately, no one ever died at Hogwarts from 1938 to 1945, as far as she can tell. It’s pretty easy to find Mum; she looks the same in almost all her photos, and seeing her posing with the Hufflepuff quidditch team in the air is a little odd, but over all, she doesn’t seem to have done all that much at school besides play quidditch and get promoted to prefect in her fifth year. There’s practically no photographs of her aside from the yearly formal one of her in her pointed black witch’s hat, hair separated into two thin braids. 

Tom Gaunt is much harder to find, mostly because Mae doesn’t know what he looked like as a boy and also because there’s about a million Toms and Thomases who attended Hogwarts during that time period. Finally while flipping through pages she catches sight of a familiar picture-perfect smile, and realizes with a start that there was never a Tom Gaunt at Hogwarts, because he had a different surname then, Riddle. She happens to be staring at his fifth year picture; he looks much the same, only his face is a little softer and more boyish, and his hair is parted differently. 

There’s a little P next to his name- he must have been a prefect too. Maybe that’s how Mum knew him; they were prefects at the same time. Everyone knows the prefects tend to turn into one big snobby clique with their private compartments on the train and their fancy bathroom (which Mae is determined to break into at some point). 

His listed extracurriculars don’t include quidditch too, though, just Slug Club, whatever that is. She suspects it has something to do with Herbology, until Ambrose, leaning over to peer over her shoulder says, “Oh, my dad was in that. Slug Club. He was really good with Potions in school; Mum says he should have gone into that instead of Witch Watching.”

“What’s Witch Watching?” Mae asks, even as she tries to angle herself over the book so Ambrose can’t figure out what she’s really looking for.

“Surveillance. Tracking people. That sort of thing,” Ambrose sounds very disinterested with the whole concept. “They’ve got loads of lists. It’s a new department; it started during the war, you know, to keep track of all the radicals and traitors going over to Grindelwald.”

Mum’s not a radical, though, so they should be fine, Mae thinks. She’s just… concerned. Right. She’s a concerned citizen and she definitely never fought for Grindelwald or anything and even if she ever betrayed anyone, they probably had it coming because Mum’s as loyal as they come, everyone says so, everyone. That’s why she has so many friends, everyone owes her favors, like Jaime Isola did, because she was always helping patch people up or run errands for them on a discount or for no money at all. Once she even got some dancer out of her contract at The Virgo, which she didn’t have to do, she only did it because it was the right thing to do. Mae sure wouldn’t have stuck her neck out for anyone like that- if you’re going to take a risk, like maybe making the Cavilla family really upset, it’d better have a very, very big reward. 

“Hm,” she says noncommittally, since Ambrose has returned to carving his initials into the table with a pocket knife. She’s actually not sure where he got that knife, but she is proud of herself for being ‘the bigger person’ for once and making peace with him, in case he was considering stabbing her or something if she kept insulting him. 

She flips to the back of the yearbook for the club photos. Ambrose is right; Slug Club has nothing to do with Herbology. It’s described as some sort of ‘academic circle for high-achieving students to socialize in an enriching environment’, but from the pictures it just looks like a bunch of smart and/or rich kids cuddling up to each other and smirking at the camera. Slughorn, the old Potions professor who Mum was worried about, preens in his photograph, adjusting a finely detailed emerald green vest. 

Mae flips over to the candid shots. There’s one of a group eating dinner together; she spots Tom Gaunt- no, Tom Riddle- in between two other boys, speaking to the blonde girl across from- one of a bunch of them ‘studying’ together although it looks more like they’re whispering back and forth and writing notes- The last candid photo is from some stupid Slug Club party. Mae squints at the teenagers and a few adults walking in and out of the frame, until she inhales sharply in shock. 

In the back corner of the photo- no one is looking straight at the camera except a proud Slughorn seated in an armchair with a drink in hand- Tom Riddle or Gaunt or whatever his name really is stands with his back against a bookshelf, turned slightly from the camera so the right side of his face is obscured, talking to a short girl with light brown hair. Mae stares at her teenaged mother for a few moments; the Amy Benson frozen in time in this photograph- the girl who will always be fifteen and happy, laughing freely as she talks to the future Minister- is smiling up at Gaunt as he says something to her, holding a cup of butterbeer in both hands, and sipping from it, every so often, peering at him over the brim. 

The photo is silent, of course, but Gaunt looks less the polished politician and more an awkward teenage boy, speaking animatedly about something, one hand propped on the bookshelf beside him, the other gesturing every so often as if to illustrate whatever point he thinks he’s making. Mae shuts the yearbook very quickly; her stomach hurts. Ambrose looks up at her, brow furrowed. “What are you doing with all these, anyways?”

“Um… extra credit,” she says quickly.

“There’s extra credit?” He brightens. “For Transfiguration? I’m failing that-,”

“Yep,” Mae says. “Extra credit for Transfiguration. Right here in the… yearbooks. That makes perfect sense.”

Ambrose scowls, although he’s put away his pocket knife. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Yeah,” she admits, and then sighs, considering. There’s got to be something she can use Ambrose for besides maybe encouraging him to beat up Mick Applewhite or Melvyn Taggart. His dad’s a Witch Watcher. He’s probably got plenty of dirt on people. Maybe Jaime Isola. Maybe even her mum. But she can’t just come right out and ask that- Ambrose might be flunking Transfiguration, but he obviously isn’t stupid. And she can’t have a repeat of what happened with Christine; what if they get into an argument and he reports it back to his parents?

“I can help you with Transfiguration,” she says, as she begins to stack the books up in a neat pile. “It’s one of my best classes.”

Ambrose looks up at her in shock, pale gingery eyebrows furrowed in genuine confusion. “Why? You don’t even know me.”

Mae shrugs. “I’ll get to. Besides, I’ll think of some way you can pay me back for it. Ooh, like letting me into the Slytherin common room.” She brightens at the thought. Best to start small right? Win his trust a little before she starts squeezing him for information. Now she feels like a real detective. Putting all her cunning and street smarts to the test. “I heard you can see right into the lake through the windows.”

Ambrose makes a ‘I’m not telling’ noise, but smiles slightly. “Alright. Thanks.” To her surprise, he gets up and helps her put back the heavy yearbooks, easily lifting them up under his arm.

They’ve just got everything put away when there’s the sound of footfall around the corner, and Ambrose hurriedly moves to block the view of the empty cart just as Marian comes into view, an unusually wide book in her arms. “You’re still in detention?” she asks incredulously, pausing to look at both of them, before nodding politely at Ambrose.

He flushes slightly and nods awkwardly back, trying to do that thing boys do where they act like they don’t really care that you’ve acknowledged them, but really they do. “Hi Marian.”

“You two know each other?” Mae shouldn’t be that surprised; Marian’s got a few friends in Slytherin, and one or two in Hufflepuff. No Gryffindors, though, shocker. Most of them probably couldn’t put up with her raining on their parades. 

“Sure we do,” Marian says more amiably than she’d expected; Mae squints at her book- now it makes sense, it’s one of those big cartography books. Marian loves maps. She even draws them; Mae has seen glimpses of what looks like a rough outline of Hogwarts, although it’s supposed to be technically impossible to make a static map of, because the interior is always rearranging itself, you know, in case of invasion or something, back from when it was a real castle in the medieval times with knights and sorcerers and all that sort of stuff. 

“My mum is taking photos for his cousin’s wedding,” she continues, and Mae breaks out of her squinting to look between Ambrose and Marian in surprise.

“Who’s your cousin?” she asks, genuinely curious for once, and not just humoring them.

“Lydia Rosier,” Ambrose replies, with a small shrug. “My mum’s her auntie.” Seeing Mae’s baffled stare, he explains, not unkindly, “My mum is Clara Rosier. Her brother, my uncle, is Gilbert Rosier. His daughter’s getting married in April. To Minister Gaunt. Mum's so excited.”

“You don’t know who Lydia Rosier is?” Marian asks Mae, scoffing a little. Sometimes she's even more annoying than Christine. At least Christine is so sheltered that she won't even read half the Daily Prophet because she thinks it might be inappropriate for a young girl. Marian's always got it memorized cover to back so she can quote statistics at people and show off how smart and cultured she is.

Mae gives her a dark look. Now is not the time to push her. “Of course I do,” she snaps. “She’s that socialite the papers are always going crazy over.”

“You don’t read the papers,” Marian points out, unhelpfully.

“Well, I’ve heard of her, alright?” Mae is about say more, than bites her lip. Ambrose’s bloody cousin is getting married to Tom Gaunt! Marian’s mum is going to be at their wedding! This is either the mother of all coincidences, or the magical world really is as small and cramped as everyone keeps complaining it is. Everyone’s either married to everyone else, or working for them. “Does that mean you get to go to the wedding, Marian?” she forces herself to ask in a more polite, neutral voice. 

Marian looks as though she hadn’t really considered that. “I hope not. I’ve got better things to do than watch rich people in silly hats eat cake.” 

She would say that. If Marian ever gets married it will probably be in a court room and take under ten minutes. To be fair, Mae can’t blame her- who wants to get married, anyways? As if she’d ever want to have to change her name from ‘Benson’ to something else, or promise to obey someone. Mum said that’s what the Anglican vows say, and so Mae assumes that if F.W. Shelby had lived, they would have gotten married in some other church, or no church at all.

Ambrose seems visibly distressed by this. “The cake will be really good, though,” he says in a small voice, which doesn’t really fit with his big body. “I- I know they picked a really… expensive caterer. If you came you’d see.” 

Marian gives him an odd look, then says, “Well, I don’t know. Mum might need my help with her equipment and whatnot. So maybe I will be there.”

Good, Mae thinks, and wonders if two months is enough time to get herself as Marian’s last-minute plus-one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Felt a little awkward to get back to Mae's voice after several chapters straight of Amy versus Tom grownup drama, but it was refreshing to not have any super tense scenes for once beyond Mae bickering with her classmates and getting in trouble, as usual.
> 
> 2\. Amy has clearly been out of sorts in the month since that fateful meeting with Tom, to the point where Mae has noticed how oddly her mother is behaving. This is only heightening her growing suspicion and desire to find out more about Amy's past.
> 
> 3\. Mae would love to fancy herself a real detective, but her work is getting off to a very bumpy start. This is only hampered by the fact that until now she's been off in her own little childish world and has only just begun to start maybe paying more attention to current events. Which is probably a little frustrating to read, so I apologize, but I also want to write her behaving in a realistically childish manner, which means she's a bit... scattered and easily distracted from what she should really focus on.
> 
> 4\. Ambrose Bulstrode was briefly referenced in the last Lydia chapter, as his mother was complaining about his birth, which his father slept through, apparently. Ambrose's mother Clara is one of Lydia's Rosier aunts; he is Clara's only child. His father is Eugene 'Gene' Bulstrode, a Witch Watcher, which is something like magical intelligence. Poor Ambrose is frequently the target of mockery and bad assumptions because of his size and house. The ginger hair isn't helping matters. Despite this, he's really not a bad kid, although he clearly has a temper! 
> 
> 5\. Mae is vaguely aware that Amy has not necessarily lived a life as pure as the driven snow, but she doesn't want to believe that her mother is seriously caught up in anything dangerous or 'really illegal'. Although she tries to block it out, the thought of Amy having been good friends with Tom does make her very uncomfortable, because that suggests that one of them did something which permanently tainted this friendship and that something may be coming back to haunt both Amy and Mae.
> 
> 6\. We do see some of Tom showing up in Mae's desire to befriend Ambrose in order to get some dirt about his dad's work from him. We also see the fact that Marian's mother has been mentioned as a photographer coming back into swing here- she's been contracted to take some classy photos of the happy bride and groom and their lavish nuptials, which lights up a very big lightbulb inside Mae's scheming head.


	18. Lydia III

LANCASHIRE, MARCH 1958

“A dessert stand,” Lydia enthuses, desperately trying to keep the same note of surprised delight that she’s kept for the last four gifts- useless lacy place-mats, an overly large gilded picture frame, napkins embroidered with twisting serpents, and a perilous crystalline vase that will almost certainly shatter if you look at it for too long. She runs her hands along the ceramic of the cake stand, and smiles brightly at Thelma Carrow, who is looking at her hopefully. “It’s perfect. So sweet, Thelma. Thank you.” 

Thelma’s older sister Annette Fawley is barely disguising her eye roll, not that she has much room to sneer- she was the one who gifted those absurd place-mats. Honestly. Besides, Annette is twenty six and without an engagement in sight, much to the collective horror. It’s not that she’s especially ugly or especially obnoxious, but it may very well have something to do with her ‘extended vacation abroad’ seven years ago. Mother swears up and down she was impregnated by some muggleborn and that she’s been considered tarnished goods ever since, even with the family’s best efforts to keep it hushed up.

Lydia finds the whole thing more intriguing than scandalous. She wonders if Netty is still in contact with the father; some sort of secret, torrid affair still being carried out through infrequent letters and longing stares. At least it must lend some spice to her life. Unlike poor, dull Thelma, locked into happily wedded bliss with her beau since last spring. Then again, Thelma seems to quite enjoy spending time around Archie Carrow, which is more than most here can say about their husbands. 

Thelma sits back down with a flourish, smoothing out her skirt, either oblivious or willfully ignorant of her sister’s scornful glance. Samantha Burke presents her gift next, looking as though she’d rather be anywhere else, and only prodded to the front of the room by the force of her mother’s glare. Badly done, everyone agrees. Ivy Parkinson Rowle had no business pushing the girl into a betrothal at seventeen to Charlie Burke. Everyone could see that train wreck coming from miles down the line. The wedding was miserable. Burke, to his meager credit, looked distinctly uncomfortable with a bride who’d only graduated from Hogwarts a fortnight before.

Now Samantha is eighteen going on nineteen, and ten months of marriage doesn’t seem to have matured her much. “This is for you,” she says rather childishly, handing over the very heavy, hastily wrapped gift. 

Lydia smiles in good humor, squeezing the girl’s hand. “Thank you.”

It turns out to a big glass pitcher, in the French country style, with imprinted dragonfly motifs across the glass. “Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Lydia says, to the collective smattering of applause and appreciative murmurs. “This is too generous- it must have cost a fortune.”

Samantha shrugs, picking at her nails. “Mother picked it out. I didn’t know what to get you; you already have everything.”

“Samantha,” Ivy hisses from her corner of the sun room, over the polite and impolite chuckles. “Really. Come sit down.”

“The receipt’s in the bag, if you want to return it,” Samantha continues blithely, apparently delighting in her mother’s dismay. “Charlie had me return half of what I got at my shower; we never would have been able to keep track of it all.”

There’s a few more gifts after that; champagne flutes, throw blankets, cookbooks- she has to fight very hard to keep her expression composed at that- magical seedlings for a garden, an avant garde sculpture or two. There’s perhaps thirty women gathered here, more so for the sake of posterity, she’s well aware, than out of any great feelings of friendship for her. Gilda Skeeter scribbling in front of the French doors leading out onto the veranda is proof enough of that. Who doesn’t want a passing reference in the Society section of the Daily Prophet? 

Really, it’s got very little to do with her. It could be any one of them marrying Tom Gaunt, and they’re all painfully aware of this fact. She tries to take as much pleasure from that as possible. It could have been any one of them, but it is her. Lydia feels every bride to be has the right to a little smug pleasure from time to time- honestly, she’s been nothing but a saint this past year.

As Kit begins to clear up the scattered tissue paper and wrapping littering the tiled floor, Lydia excuses herself with a gracious smile; she’s been sitting for a good hour like royalty with a receiving line, and hopefully everyone will take the hint to be their on way once they’ve had their cake and tea or whatever it is that they’re serving. She’s not all that hungry; she snuck out of the house to get lunch with Lyle. When she was little and he was still in school, once or twice a summer he would sneak her out with him to go to some muggle restaurant. She viewed it all as one big game; kicking her feet gleefully in some booth with him, eating as messily as possible out of the sight of their parents. 

Those are the only memories she has of Lyle really smiling and laughing. She would study him curiously, trying to match up the teenage boy on the other side of the table, slurping a milkshake, with the creature she lived with, who was alternately sullen or breaking into their father’s liquor cabinet so he could make it through the next dinner party. Once they saw their father out to lunch with a woman who wasn’t their mother; Lyle looked nervous but Lydia had lingered on the sidewalk, her hand in his, watching intently through the cafe window. She doesn’t think the woman was a witch, but Lyle didn’t want to talk about it and took her right home after that.

Her relationship with her brother is a curious thing; Lydia likes to observe him and all the little tics and habits that comprise him. Really, she’d liken it to… a researcher studying a subject. She’s often bemused and exasperated by his choices, sometimes feels fond, almost protective, of him, and sometimes she just wants to throttle him. She hasn’t seen much of him as of late; Tom’s swamped him with mundane tasks so Lyle doesn’t have the time to wonder why he hasn’t been granted more power. 

He’s a fool if he still honestly believes he’s in line for Right Hand Man. Lydia’s money is on Michael Applewhite, hit wizard or not. He’s likely looking to retire from the force soon anyways; hunting down wizards and witches is a young man’s game, and Applewhite’s headed past his prime. Besides, Tom well knows it will improve his image. The Applewhites are far from pureblood elites. Michael Applewhite is likely a halfblood. There are rumors that his wife is a muggleborn. It will soften any prevailing notions that the ruling government is permanently skewed towards pureblood interests. 

She’s making conversation with Miranda Crabbe, who is desperately trying to hide her jealousy by insinuating that Tom will never be home; “He’s so busy now, it’s must be so difficult for you, Lydia, I can’t imagine only seeing William once or twice a week, that must be truly crushing at times-,”

Lydia’s almost relieved to see her mother making her way over, at this point.

“Miranda, your grandmother was just wondering if you might be able to bring her a slice of cake,” Cordelia says smoothly, dismissing Miranda with a polite smile. Lydia is almost impressed, a rare feeling to associate with her mother. Miranda slinks off towards some old crone sitting on the sofa, and Cordelia leads Lydia into a small alcove. The day started off bright and sunny, but it’s been gradually clouding over since the morning, and rain is beginning to pelt the expansive glass windows. 

“Straighten your blouse,” Cordelia says under her breath, “that Skeeter woman is watching us.”

Lydia forces a smile, and adjusts the rhinestone embroidered collar of her pale blue jersey blouse, smoothing out her skirt and turning so Gilda Skeeter can’t see their lips moving from here. “Cecily still won’t come down? It’s nearly over- they’ll just fan over the baby for a few minutes, really-,”

“She says she has a headache,” Cordelia purses her lips together in prim disapproval. “I offered to take Caroline, but she says she just got her to sleep.”

“I don’t know who sleeps more these days, her or the baby,” Lydia says tightly, although it really doesn’t matter- Cecily’s absence will be whispered about, but hardly to the degree that it might be were she from a better family. As it stands, everyone knows she wouldn’t have been able to marry into the Rosiers even one generation ago, when they were still wedding Fawleys and Malfoys. She doesn’t matter enough to be gossiped over. 

“It’s the baby blues,” Cordelia agrees. “She’ll be through with that in time for the wedding. I had it with your brother.”

“But not with me?” Lydia smiles, lips just as taut as her tone.

“No,” says Cordelia, almost innocently. “You were different.”

A clatter of heels across the floor- Gilda Skeeter has finally roused herself from her perch and is making her way over in full girl reporter regalia, although she’s hardly a girl, despite the obnoxious bottle blonde hair dye. Lydia takes in her cheap striped black and white cotton pullover and straight beige wool skirt, and steps forward, tilting her head just so. Truth be told, she finds Skeeter about as insufferable as Skeeter must find her. The woman clearly has a grudge about constantly being assigned to the ‘woman’s interests’ stories, and a nasty habit of taking it out on her subjects. In turn, Lydia, while she certainly respects the power of the press, is already fantasizing about ten different ways to censor the Prophet if it means never having to hold her breath while reading a Skeeter article again. 

“Mrs. Skeeter,” she says, congenially- Tom did a background check months ago- Gilda Skeeter, halfblood, thirty nine, former Gryffindor, widowed by a muggle husband lost in the war, one young daughter, aged six, struggling to make ends meet, often found in one of Knockturn’s uglier pubs on the weekends, knocking back drinks and scouting out story leads for the great expose of her dreams, obnoxious and nosy but generally harmless due to the practical inclinations of her editors. “I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself- did you get everything you needed for your article?”

“Some of the gifts were so lovely, weren’t they?” Cordelia cuts in. “Did you have your photographer take some pictures of them? I think they would really compliment the write-up.”

“Christopher took his smoke break forty minutes ago,” Gilda says bluntly, “but if he can be tracked down, I’ll certainly usher him inside to snap some shots of the… champagne flutes and the throw cushions.”

“Then it’s a good thing we didn’t book him for the wedding,” Lydia retorts, smile unwavering. “Mother, I think Auntie Clara is trying to wave you down. I’ll catch up in a minute.”

Cordelia, mercifully, for once, takes the hint and leaves the two of them to duke it out. Gilda exhales in amusement. Lydia smiles all the more. 

“I’ve just got a few follow-up questions,” Gilda says, retrieving her small notebook, quill poised at the ready. “So many readers find you… completely engaging, you know? So approachable. Would you say that’s a result of your upbringing, or have you had to swiftly adjust to a life in the public eye, now that you’re about to become Mrs. Tom Gaunt?”

Lydia will give her this. She’s good at leading with a compliment or two before applying the vise grip. “Oh, well I wouldn’t say my upbringing was anything special,” she demures, sitting down in a nearby window seat- she prefers to sit while people are speaking to her, because it makes them feel slightly beholden, as though they’re imposing on her, more so than if they were simply standing beside one another. “I had a wonderful childhood in the countryside with two deeply devoted parents and a protective big brother,” she looks up at Gilda serenely. “What more could any girl want? I like to think my family played some part in shaping the woman I am today.”

“Of course,” says Gilda, not looking up from her scribbling. “What a beautiful sentiment, Miss Rosier. But I do wonder if any of this has been overwhelming for you? After all, it can’t have been easy to plan a wedding while your fiance was gearing up for election season. Not to mention your, well…” She looks up then, with a sharp little smile of her own, that cuts at her small, pointed jaw and chin. “Physical frailties. I’m sure it’s well known by now that your childhood, happy as it may have been, was severely impacted by your illnesses.”

Lydia doesn’t let herself stiffen; she relaxes instead, slumps her shoulder slightly, dips her chin as if in acceptance of her limitations. She hasn’t come this far to be tripped up by some second rate gossip-monger. “It was difficult for me,” she confesses, “to accept that I wouldn’t be able to attend Hogwarts, as a child. But I like to think my education at home also prepared me for adult life in a variety of ways I might have missed out on had I been sent off to school. I was largely responsible for what I learned. It taught me independence, and hard work. No coasting along copying my friends’ answers for the homework or whispering in the back of class, that sort of thing.”

“But it must have been very lonely, at times,” Gilda presses, brown eyes keen with interest. “After all, one might say the lifestyle of a pureblooded family such as the Rosiers is already isolated enough.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say ‘isolated’,” Lydia waves at hand at the guests filling the airy sun room, nibbling on their cake, sipping at their tea, comparing notes on who spent the most money on what. Samantha Burke is frowning down at her slice, dragging her fork across a napkin. Lavinia Urquhart is arguing with her mother. Therese is standing in a doorway, slowly surveying the crowd of pastel-colored guests like a reigning queen, her gaze cool and inscrutable. 

“Well, weddings have a way of bringing people together,” Gilda agrees without missing a beat, “but what comes afterwards for the new Mrs. Gaunt? Can we expect any surprising career moves?” The irony drenching her voice is hard to miss- she knows very well that Lydia never took her scant amount of NEWTs at home, and certainly didn’t produce any outstanding marks on them. Even were she to suddenly secure a position at the Ministry, it would take all of five minutes before everyone began to whisper about Tom humoring a restless young wife who, for want of children, needed something to keep her busy. 

“My first priority will always be my family and my husband,” Lydia blinks as if surprised Gilda would even bother to ask. “Tom’s under an immense amount of pressure, and anything I can do to help lighten the load he’s bearing- I consider it my duty as his wife. Of course we’re all thrilled with his success thus far, and I’m excited to see what the future holds for us, but I understand that his office is no walk in the park. It carries an enormous responsibility-,”

“Enormous power, too,” Gilda interjects. “That reminds me- I did want to ask for your opinions on some of the legislation he’s put forward since the Wizengamot resumed its sessions- the Statute Amendments and Recommended Revisions, for example? Do you agree that Britain should begin to ease up on restrictions against magic used on or in the presence of muggles? For the immediate release of prisoners in Azkaban sentenced for using magic to fight in the muggle war against Germany and the other Axis powers? What about the general recommendations that the Trace be removed entirely from children raised in pureblood households? Do you think it presents an unfair standard for future generations? Or a ripe possibility for abuse-,”

There’s a smattering of exclamations and applause- Cecily’s made a belated appearance, looking exhausted, baby Caroline in her arms. Infants are regarded as a precious commodity these days, and she’s immediately surrounded by a bevy of crooning admirers, all so thrilled to see a new little witch gurgling and kicking away in her mother’s arms. Four months of life have yet to improve Caro’s looks, but Lydia supposes she’s still got years to go. Hopefully she takes after Cecily more so than Lyle. Her brother’s no troll but he’s not exactly what one could call a looker, either, and Cecily used to regularly turn heads back when she and he were just engaged.

“Excuse me,” she says, standing up, “I should see if my sister-in-law needs anything; she’s been feeling a little poorly today.”

“Is that why she was absent from the shower?” Gilda presses. “Miss Rosier, if you could answer even one of my questions about those articles, I really do think some of my readers would be very interested to hear your opinions-,”

“Mrs. Skeeter,” Lydia turns back to her, even lays a hand gently on her arm. “I appreciate your ambition, truly, I do, but let’s be honest. No one reading the Society section of the paper is all that interested in what I have to say about politics. All they need to know is that I stand behind Tom’s vision for our future, one hundred percent.”

“Our future?” Gilda’s brows, far darker than her dyed hair, knot together. “Or the future of a select few-,”

Caroline begins to wail, overwhelmed by all the attention, and Lydia gives a rueful ‘what can you do?’ smile and makes her escape. 

From the corner of her eye, as she rocks Caroline in her arms, humming under her breath, to a chorus of approving comments on what a fine mother she’ll make, hopefully someday very soon, Lydia watches as Gilda Skeeter angrily packs her things and hurries outside into the downpour to flag down her absconding photographer. Eight hundred words on a baby shower, and she wants to turn it into a last ditch effort to branch out into political reporting. Typical of a former Gryffindor to drop all pretense and go for the throat like that. Tom will laugh when he hears about this; another bumbling idiot tripping over themselves in their attempts to catch him out. 

And speak of the devil- as the first of their guests begin to leave, tutting about the bad weather, although it hardly matters when most of them are Flooing home- there’s a delivery at the front door. Lydia eagerly hands a now merely whining Caroline back to her mother and hurries to answer it before any of the elves can appear, practically skidding in her kitten heels, and returns the triumphant conqueror, a fantastic bouquet of white roses in her arms, which perfectly compliment the sky blue of her top and the floral blue and white of her full skirt. 

“Isn’t he such a gem?” she exclaims to anyone who will listen- and they all are. Miranda Crabbe looks like someone shoved a lemon into her mouth, Lavinia Urquhart is gaping, Ada Burke, now Malfoy, nods approvingly as she slips on her cloak, and Clara hurries over to smell them, exclaiming at how fresh they are. “He even sent along a note, Mother, listen-,” she appeals to Cordelia, who reluctantly extricates herself from preening over her granddaughter, “Hope the shower was everything you wished for, and hope I may take you out to dinner tonight, six thirty.”

He wrote it himself; she recognizes his handwriting immediately, small and cramped but very, very neat. Tom never dictates ‘personal’ matters; he considers it unprofessional to have secretaries make out cards expressing congratulations or condolences in his name, and he writes all his own invitations, no matter the occasion, although of course she’ll be the one to make them out after the wedding. She finds it sweet, in a sense. He’s so oddly defensive of things like that, so determined to be his own man, down to the most mundane details. 

The prospect of avoiding a dreary family dinner at home cheers her up a good deal, as does the passing of the rain showers. It’s dry again by the time all the guests have departed and the gifts have been carefully put away, and Lydia wastes no time in redoing her hair and changing for dinner. Tom meets her at the door, as always, insists on going inside to greet her mother and father and have just one drink with them, then offers a walk through the gardens, muddy and barren as they are when it’s not even the first of spring yet. Lydia accepts, naturally, and tucks her arm into his, admiring the way the fox fur coat he got her for Yule gleams in the dying grey light. 

He expects a full report of just about any event she attends that involves the press, which is only natural, given the circumstances. The first six months of any minister’s tenure is crucial. They need any and every article that so much as mentions him or her in passing to be glowing. He needs to be portrayed as capable, clever and above all, determined to enact meaningful changes to their current institutions, and she needs to be portrayed as beautiful, witty, supportive, and above all, completely confident in his abilities. Otherwise, what would be the point of their marriage? She makes him seem more down to earth and grounded- a man swept head over heels for a society darling- and he makes her seem more practical and sympathetic- a young woman determined to stand behind her man as he climbs the teetering ranks of government and fights for all of their futures. 

Lydia gives him the basics of it; she always appreciates that he never interrupts her once he asks her a question; Tom always listens, and intently at that, looking at her as though her words had meaning, as if he cared what they were and how she said them, and it brings a sort of pleased flush to her cheeks, not out of attraction or self-consciousness but a strange sort of pride flaming in her chest, that someone, anyone, wants to hear what she has to say and doesn’t already have an answer or assumption in mind for her.

He’s quiet for a moment when she’s done with her frank appraisal of Skeeter’s leading questions and obvious attempts to trip her up into revealing more than she ought to, then says, “You should have answered her.”

Lydia looks sharply up at him, without removing her arm from his. His hat shadows his eyes, and his tone is mild but deadly serious. “Obviously she wasn’t going to get it into an article either way, but now you’ve just inflamed her further by playing coy. All she wanted was for you to confirm her biases. Play the fool. Get a little flustered. Confess you’ve been so caught up with wedding planning and the new baby that you haven’t even had time to read up on it.”

“You want me to play court fool so she can get her jabs in, and walk away satisfied?” Lydia demands, slightly stung. “That’s not- I _have_ read the bills, you know I have-,”

“That’s not the point,” he says coolly. “She doesn’t care. They don’t care, Lydia. She wanted one of two things to occur; for you to disagree with me in front of her, a reporter, on the record, or for you to admit to being the simpering little ditz she so desperately wants you to be, because she goes home every night to a shabby little apartment and a neglected child demanding food on the table.”

Lydia looks away, cheeks burning with a different sort of feeling. “But I-,” she catches herself, and exhales. “You do care that I- that I’m educated on it, don’t you, the laws you’re proposing, the new policies-,”

“Of course,” he says. “How would it look if my own wife hadn’t the slightest idea what I was proposing? But no one’s requiring you to be a legal expert, or to play so coy with the press. Just tell them what they want to hear, and they’ll do the rest. It’s not the most strenuous of exercises, believe me, I know.”

“No one interviews me the way they do you, Tom,” she huffs. His pace slows and she tenses slightly, concerned he might already be in a poor mood from a long day at work and thus have very little patience for any push back from her, but instead he presses an almost appeasing kiss to her forehead, as if consoling a disappointed child. 

“I know,” he says. “It’s a symptom of the situation at present. You have to be patient. I was, when I had them ramming skeptical questions down my throat after my appointment to Office Head five years ago. They’d make a show of my surname, ask me what relation I was, exactly, to the House of Gaunt, bring up my school records as if I had something to hide.”

“You’ve nothing to be ashamed of,” she tells him firmly, almost believing it herself, as if he were her prized racing dog. Just another greyhound fresh off the track. “Everything you’ve built for yourself- it breeds envy. And hate. People can’t believe how extraordinary a person you are. It shames them.” 

“It’s never shamed you.” He’s in a good mood, she’s realizing, now, a very good mood. Come to think of it, he’s been almost unusually amiable for the past few months, ever since the new year, although he was horribly tense around Christmas. He made a mild effort to disguise the fact that he made an appearance at the MESP gala without her, but ultimately she wasn’t all that put out, although she got quite the account from Therese regarding the appearance of one Lucinda Amell- how her aunt loathes that nurse- and her Amell’s latest favorite, of course, one lucky little Amy Benson. 

Well, she can hardly forbid him the occasional bit of adolescent curiosity. Men are all little boys at heart, truth be told, and perhaps it really was just that for him- a nagging desire to check up on the old flame, see if any sparks were still flying, congratulate himself on being well rid of her. Maybe he stood in one corner of the ballroom all night, gloating to himself, and she in the other, sipping at her drink and feeling desperately out of place. Or maybe not. Lyle swears he dropped by the townhouse one Saturday evening back in January, and the lights were out- Tom was off somewhere, not at the Ministry, not out at any of the gentlemen’s clubs.

It might prove a bit of a… hurdle to leap over. Lydia had hoped to at least get a few years of marriage under their belts before she had to perform any hasty damage control when it came to other women. Or woman, singular. Honestly, perhaps she should be thanking him for keeping it so simple. If he’s already on the hunt for a mistress, a Hogwarts professor is perhaps a fairly sensible choice, since she has just as much to lose with any news of it going public as he does. No chance of any vengeful accusations of heartbreak and infidelity being plastered across the front pages. 

No, Lydia’s not very worried about in the sense of Tom rekindling some long lost romance. It’s more so… the other possibilities. The child, for one thing. The circumstances, for another. The look on Amy Benson’s face whenever Tom was mentioned during their brief lunch with each other did not exactly speak to some sort of hastily repressed longing or blatant desire. Lydia could have even accepted it if it were fear. She’s seen Tom make people quite afraid more than once, usually with no more than a look or a few quiet, cutting words. But while there might have been a little fear and wariness mixed in there, mostly it was anger. A deep, abiding, rooted sort of anger. Not a passing outrage or indignation. Real loathing. The kind that makes you eagerly dread something, like waiting for someone to walk by so you can spit in front of them. 

Or maybe she’s massively overreacting to this. The perfectly stereotypical paranoid princess, worried the prince might be eyeing up the scullery maid while he’s draping her in furs and jewels and presenting her with roses. She smiles up at him anyways. “No,” she says. “I could never be ashamed of anything to do with you. You make me feel like I could do anything.” She takes the lapel of his woolen coat in hand, uses it to yank herself up on her tiptoes to kiss him. They might as well get their practice in now, she won’t have them writing that their wedding day kiss was ‘sweet, albeit a bit stilted’ or some nonsense like that.

“We’re going to be late for our reservation,” he says when he breaks it off, as if anyone would dare not hold a table for the Minister for Magic and his fiancee a month before their wedding. 

“Did you get the one I like, by the band?” she asks eagerly. She loves live music, which he very well knows, and if he keeps up this new, amenable trend, maybe they’ll even get some dancing in. He can pretend all he likes, she knows he’s more fond of jazz than he’s willing to let on. 

“No, they’re seating us by the kitchen doors,” he retorts, rolling his eyes a little, then smiles in cool bemusement at her laughter. 

“Listen,” she says, as they turn back towards the house, “and don’t tell me no outright, you mustn’t, Tom, but we ought to set a date to go out with Lyle and Cecily, just the four of us, before the wedding. She’s looking more and more a wreck, what with the baby, and him never home, and you know he’s peeved you keep giving him busy work while you lock yourself in your office with Burke and Malfoy and Applewhite.”

“Charles misplaced my trust,” he says, “he’s very lucky to not be in an office with me, most nights.”

Lydia laughs again at that, because truly, they were at a dinner party with the Malfoys last month, and Burke looked like a kicked dog whenever Tom so much as stood a few paces from him. Merlin knows what he did- or didn’t do- to land himself in such hot water, but there was something amusing about watching him squirm. Samantha had looked increasingly baffled by his complete aversion to Tom, and then seemed to warm to it, flouncing up to them to practice her flirting every so often. 

“We’ll take them somewhere the week before the wedding,” he decides. “One night, Lydia. God knows I spend enough time with your brother as it is.”

“He _is_ planning your stag party, Tom. Have a little care.”

“Hm,” Tom snorts. “I can hardly wait for the revelries to follow. No doubt there’ll be golden fountains of faerie wine and pyramids of nude women diving into them.”

“Don’t give him any ideas,” Lydia links her arm back with his, feeling an easy sense of camaraderie, however misplaced it might be. She’s not entirely immune. Sometimes it is very tempting to believe he might truly care for her, even in a platonic, affectionate sort of sense. It’s difficult to hold someone like Tom at arm’s length. He has that effect on people. They either want to get much closer- or much further away. But this fur coat he gave her is very warm and the future seems fragrant with possibilities and she is so close to the precipice of a brand new world that it is easy to dismiss any lingering concerns or trepidation. Her skin prickles at the thought. This time next month, she’ll be an entirely different person, and finally one of her own design.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I apologize if this felt like too much of a filler chapter, but I didn't want to just dive straight into the wedding shenanigans, and I felt like it would be good to hear from Lydia, since we haven't had a POV from her since Chapter 11. This is also my way of making up for the fact that she was *supposed* to make a brief appearance in Chapter 14, as my initial outline for the New Years encounter involved Tom showing up with Lydia in tow to crash the party. Unfortunately that didn't pan out but I am looking forward to Lydia and Amy having scenes together in the future.
> 
> 2\. I tried to look up some suitable bridal shower gifts for the era and discovered that what brides get given before their weddings... has not changed all that much since the 1950s. People are still presenting each other with ceramic cake stands and overly large vases and too-fragile pitchers. Mostly the purpose of this scene was moreso to give Lydia's very detached run down of the women she's supposed to be great friends with. She doesn't seem to have any close friendships or confidantes, which I think just adds to the lonely, isolated feelings of most of her chapters- the only person she really trusts is herself.
> 
> 3\. Lydia is surrounded by women who didn't marry for love (with the rare exception or two) and who, while they might not have quite the relationship with their husbands that she does with Tom, certainly wouldn't consider it odd to view marriage as being completely separate from love/affection/friendship. Between Samantha Burke being married off at a very young age simply for the sake of a 'suitable' pureblooded match, to Annette Rowle being considered 'tarnished goods' over rumors that she had a child out of wedlock with a muggle man years earlier, to the acknowledgement that Lydia's only father (who she barely seems to interact with at all) was far from faithful to her mother... it's a big old mess brimming with dysfunction, so Lydia feels quite normal in what she expects of marriage to Tom.
> 
> 4\. Lyle and Lydia might not have what could be called a 'loving' sibling bond at present, but they did have some happier memories together back in the day, even if Lydia admits she's come to view him as more of a subject for observation than a brother she can rely on. 
> 
> 5\. While Cecily does love her daughter, she seems to have sunken into a depression in the months following her birth, something the Rosier family is unwilling to acknowledge with anything other than exasperation or pity. 
> 
> 6\. These Skeeter women and their meddling reporting! When will it end? Gilda's attempt to transform a light-hearted piece on a bridal shower into some hard-hitting political journalism fails miserably, but she does succeed in getting under Lydia's skin, which is no small feat. Because of this, we finally see some mention of actual policies Tom is attempting to implement- an overall loosening of the Statute of Secrecy in Britain, for one, or at least softening the consequences for breaking it, whether that be in self defence, an effort to aid or attack muggles, or otherwise. He also seems to be in favor of changing the way the Trace on underaged magic is used.
> 
> 7\. Babies are a big deal in the pureblood circles, given some increasing concerns over waning fertility. Most of the women Lydia knows only have one child, despite years of marriage, and there is a collective terror of potential squibs. 
> 
> 8\. Tom is very pointed about making certain things public, such as sending Lydia flowers when he knows she has company. On the other hand, she seems to view him taking her out to dinner as purely him doing something for her that he knows she'll enjoy- a night away from her miserable family. 
> 
> 9\. Lydia, we see, is actually a bit defensive at the notion of playing down her intelligence or being viewed simply as Tom's arm candy, something she worries might offend him, but which he actually doesn't seem to mind (because it reminds him of Amy, maybe, maybe not). He's quick to try to reassure her when she questions whether he wants her to be seen as just his silly little socialite wife whose only interests are party planning and interior design. We also see that she suspects he hit up that MESP party purely for the shot of running into Amy, and that Lydia is in fact hoping that was for romantic reasons (which she figures she can deal with) more so than for any other reasons. 
> 
> 10\. Next chapter... a pureblood wedding, what could go wrong? You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com).


	19. Mae VII

LANCASHIRE, APRIL 1958

Her first plan of attack is an utter failure. To her credit Mae really does try, though. If she wants Marian to warm up to her enough to invite her, then logic must dictate that she needs to appeal to Marian in a way that would make her happy. What makes Marian happy? Well, she likes to draw. She likes studying and reading for fun, too. She likes peace and quiet and for everything to be neat and tidy. She likes to go to bed early and wake up early. She likes being on time for class and finishing her homework early. She likes her cat Dorian and she likes chocolate and she likes listening to Valerie play the violin. 

Mae tries, really, she does. She holds her tongue, doesn’t exchange nasty looks with Christine, tries to be tidier, doesn’t leave her things lying out, doesn’t stay up too late chattering away with Valerie while Christine groans and Marian holds her pillow over her ears. She keeps Salome from disrupting Marian’s neatly stacked drawing paper and pencils, she gives Dorian extra treats. She lets Marian borrow some of her books and pretends to enjoy reading _The Secret Garden_ , which is one of Marian’s favorites, even though Mae does not and the stupid book made her want to burn the garden down and lock those annoying kids in it, too. 

She even gets Marian some chocolate from Honeydukes (well, she bribes Ambrose with tutoring to bribe one of the older Slytherins to buy some). Marian asks if she did something to it or if it’s trick chocolate, the prank kind that tastes like cardboard when you bite it. 

Sometimes Mae feels an overwhelming urge to strangle Marian while shrieking, “I’m trying to be a good friend!” but that seems a little bit counterproductive. 

Mostly, it occurs to her around her twelfth birthday, which is celebrated in very subdued fashion- eleven was the big one, what’s the point of twelve, it’s not even thirteen, it’s just boring, if you ask her- that maybe Marian isn’t falling over herself with praise for Mae’s ‘new leaf’ because, well… she thinks Mae should have been behaving like that all along. Being nice and polite and not starting arguments at two in the morning or making a mess in the room or sneering back and forth with Christine or letting Sal shred someone else’s shoelaces yet again. As though maybe she ought to have been, well… more considerate all along.

Mum would probably agree, but Mae hasn’t been speaking to her much lately, although Mum got her a bunch of new books- the complete Sherlock Holmes- and some new shoes. Mum isn’t as snappish and scattered as she was back in February, but she’s still not back to her ‘old self’ yet, either, and Mae finds it easier to focus on her investigation than spend all her time fretting. Maybe she can help Mum, once she knows everything. She can, you know- they’ll come up with a plan or something to get rid of the Minister or expose him or something and Mum will be so shocked at how good Mae is at this sort of thing. She’ll stop treating her like such a baby, stop lying to her left and right, stop hiding things.

But February passes through March, her birthday comes and goes, March grinds to a halt, April begins, and the long-awaited Easter break looms closer and closer. Marian and her are getting along much better, sure, but Marian hasn’t said anything about the wedding, or asked Mae if she’d want to go, or- Mae’s just not sure what to do. Should she ask Marian point-blank if she can come with her? Should she make up some reason as to why she needs to be at this wedding? Marian’s not going to buy ‘oh, I love Minister Gaunt!’ as an excuse, nor is she going to believe, ‘Lydia Rosier is my idol, she’s so beautiful and sophisticated!’. Maybe Mae really should have pretended to be more interested in the paper and witchy magazines.

The wedding is the 12th. Break starts on the 4th. If she misses out on this, when’s the next time she’s going to get the chance to scrounge up a load of dirt on some purebloods and the Minister? It’s not as if she can just pop into the Ministry for a tour whenever she likes. Right now all she knows is that Mum and the Minister maybe used to be friends, that he’s maybe involved with that Knights of Walpurgis group which no one seems to know much about except that they’re a ‘fraternal order’, and that Mum is clearly scared of him, or at least scared of what he might do, or what he already did. Mae has to go. She can’t just sit around letting her whole first year go to waste when she could be actually doing something worthwhile. Being bored out of her mind in class because most of it isn’t that challenging and the professors are tired of teaching by now, that doesn’t count.

So she tells her. What else is she going to do? She can’t not go, she has to tell her. Mae tells Marian, well if not all of it, a summarized, brief version of it, and this confession is carried out under the quidditch stands, because statistically speaking it’s the least likely place for some nosy (and they’re almost all nosy) Ravenclaws to pop up. Mae hangs off the bottom of one of the lower stands while doing so, mindlessly lifting herself up and down again until her arm muscles go all limp and noodley. Then she lowers herself back into the mud. Marian is leaning against a post, her arms folded tightly, the way they always are when she’s thinking hard, her brow furrowed.

“If you’re making this up for a joke,” she says, after a long moment, “I’m going to curse you, Mae Benson.”

“I swear, I’m not lying,” Mae retorts. “Okay? What, do you need me to sign it in blood or something? Why would I make this up? So I could go to some rich people wedding with you and eat cake and make fun of their hats?”

Marian tilts her head slightly.

Mae sighs. “I’m not, alright? I promise. I only told you because I didn’t know what else to do!” Besides, odd as it may sound, she does… trust Marian. Marian’s serious and sober and responsible- and she doesn’t go around running her mouth or gossiping, either. In fact, she loathes it. Of everyone Mae’s met so far this year, her and Malcolm are probably the most trustworthy, and Malcolm’s not the one who can get her to the Rosier estate in time for the ‘wedding of the year’. She’s taking a big risk here! And she does feel very guilty about it- and a little nervous, if she’s being honest, and Mae isn’t used to feeling nervous like this. Marian should be honored Mae trusts her enough to play the Watson to her Sherlock. Or something like that. Anyways-

“You could have told your mum,” Marian says. “Maybe you misunderstood what she and Dumbledore were talking about. There could be a perfectly good explanation for all of this-,”

“Like what?” Mae snaps. “Name one.”

A long silence follows. Marian sighs. “Do you even have a plan? What are you going to do, stalk the Minister all night? You won’t exactly blend in.”

“Sure I will, there’ll probably be loads of kids there,” Mae argues. “And I’m not going to stalk him- I’m going to collect information! Scout things out, you know, know thy enemy-,”

“You don’t even know if you have enemies,” Marian points out flatly.

“God, do you have to be such a buzzkill all the time?” Mae shoots back, glaring at her.

Marian glares back, unfazed, then bites her lip in consternation. “I just think you’re being really reckless. If this is actually real and there’s something- if something’s going on with your mother, or if she knows about some… criminal behavior or something, and you go around attracting all kinds of attention, snooping around, that might end really badly.”

“So what? I’m supposed to just sit here, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for something bad to happen first?” Mae scowls. “I’m just asking you for one favor, Marian. Alright? Just one. You don’t even have to do anything, just get me to the wedding. I swear I won’t bother you all night. Or ever again, if you want. We don’t have to ever talk about this again.”

Marian mutters something under her breath and turns away for a moment, tracing a line in the muddy spring earth underfoot with the toe of her patent leather shoe. Mae groans. Marian is tugging at the cut of her black pageboy now, smoothing out the curled ends of her dark, glossy hair. Then she turns back around, brown eyes narrowed in determination. 

“Alright,” she says. “Here’s what we’ll do. Ask your mum for permission to stay over with my family that weekend. My dad and my brother aren’t going to the wedding. My mum will be so pleased I have company that she won’t think twice about it. We will go to the wedding. We will be, very- very!- careful. We can’t get my mum in trouble, alright? This is her most expensive contract of the year. If you don’t find anything useful at, that’s it. I’m not breaking in anywhere with you, or… or following people- just don’t be stupid! Got it?”

Mae gapes at her for a moment, then grins in relieved delight. “Really?”

Marian gives a tight, begrudging little nod. Impulsively, Mae embraces her, something she’s never done before with anyone but her mum. Marian jerks back in surprise, then pats her on the back somewhat stiffly, before Mae lets go. 

“It’ll be fine,” Mae tells her almost giddily. “You’ll see.”

Mum is a different story. The look she gives Mae when Mae tells her Marian’s invited her to spend a few days visiting her in Reading over the break is one of baffled suspicion, before she seems to catch up with herself. “Are you sure?” she asks, as if Mae might have somehow misconstrued some innocent small-talk into an invitation for a sleepover. 

Mae replies with stony silence, picking at the arm of her chair, playing the guilt card. “If you don’t want me to go…”

“No,” Mum finally looks all the way away from the test she’s grading, and forces a smile. “I- I’m sorry, love, no, of course you can go, I’m just- surprised. I didn’t realize you two were so close. I thought you were more friendly with Valerie Faraday.”

Mae shrugs, and says testily, “I can be friends with more than one person, you know. You are.”

Mum inhales, then nods. “Right. Well, yes- of course you can go. When should I pick you up? That Sunday? You know, this will work out really well, I think. You’ll have the whole week before that to yourself, and then the week after that. Honestly, they always have such a long break for Easter, you’re lucky-,”

Mae is already standing up, snatching up her book-bag. “I have to go study now. Bye.” Mum trails off into hurt silence behind her as she hurries out of the office. But fair is fair. Mum lied to her face, about loads of stuff, then decided to act all strange and snappy for weeks and weeks afterwards, and Mae never got any bloody apology for that. She’s not the only one who’s allowed to get mad for no reason. 

And Mae’s been mad a lot lately, to be honest. She’s not sure why- well, she knows why, scientifically, she’s going through puberty, as Madam Amell would say, her body and mind are undergoing all sorts of grotesque and disturbing changes, her mental framework is being rearranged, she’s being flooded with hormones- however you want to describe it. The point is, she gets angry, a lot. 

She usually doesn’t stay angry for long, but it always feels good, being angry. It feels justified. She’s put up with a lot, this year! Everyone else gets to be independent, to be away from their parents, to not have to constantly think about their family. They don’t have to worry. She does. It never goes away, because she sees Mum every single day, and every single day she’s reminded that Mum didn’t trust her enough to tell her the truth, or even part of the truth.

She wishes her dad were alive. He probably wouldn’t have lied. He would have made Mum tell her everything right away. He’d trust her enough not to treat her like some little kid. 

On the afternoon of April 11th, Mum walks down to the outskirts of Hogsmeade to summon the Knight Bus with Mae, who has a single small suitcase with a few changes of clothes and a party dress Aunt Ruby got her for her birthday last year smuggled into the bottom under her pyjamas and slippers. She doubts Mum will notice it’s missing from her wardrobe in the cottage, and even if she does, it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe Mae wanted to play dress-up, for the first time in her life. Mum likes clothes; she ought to understand. 

“I’ll come fetch you at ten o’clock on Sunday,” Mum tells her, a hand on Mae’s tense shoulder. “Alright? Now, please be polite and respectful, Mae. It’s very generous of them to offer to let you stay over for two days like this, I’m sure they’re very busy-,”

Right. Maybe if Mum even cared to look into it more, she might have realized Marian’s mum is an up-and-coming photographer who’s been booking increasingly bigger work across magical Britain. But then again, she probably has other things on her mind. Loads of other things. “It’s not generous,” Mae snaps. “It’s normal. Okay? This is what normal people do, have friends over. You’re always telling me to be grateful for normal things, like- like getting to eat dinner or not having to clean floors. Just because your childhood was-,” Was shite, she was going to say, just because your childhood was utter shite and you had to do all these chores and pretend you actually enjoyed living in some grimy orphanage and wearing ugly hand-me-downs and never getting anything nice or doing anything fun-

But she can’t say that, because then Mum might not let her go. As it stands, Mum just removes her hand from her shoulder, looks away, extends her wand. The Knight Bus appears with a dreadful squealing of brakes. “Have a good time,” she says, curtly, and kisses Mae on the forehead. “See you on Sunday.”

Mae darts across the gravel road, change jingling in her clenched fist, and clambers aboard. 

Marian lives in Reading, which is a town an hour outside London. Mae doesn’t see much of it because she’s too busy trying not to vomit on the shoes of the elderly witch standing beside her on the bus. She’s only ridden the Knight Bus a few times before, and it’s always the same- thrilling for the first ten or so minutes, then a nightmare. 

Marian’s house, which the bus deposits her right outside of, is at the end of a cul-de-sac in a very muggle neighbourhood. Marian says her parents think all wizards should live among muggles, that there should be an ‘unseen unity’ between the two communities, and that wizards would be less snotty and ignorant if they saw the day to day of muggle life. That said, it is a very nice red brick house which has to have at least four bedrooms, maybe more, judging from all the windows. There’s all vivid red-and-yellow tulips growing next to the stoop. 

Mae goes up the walk and knocks, feeling a bit awkward, and then waits. Knocks again. She can distantly hear music playing. Finally, the door is yanked open, not by a grown-up but by a little boy with mussed up black hair and rather skeptical hooded eyes. “Hello,” he grunts, looking at her. He has the same long nose as his sister. “Who’re you?”

“Who’re you?” Mae replies.

“M’Sam. Who’re you?”

“I’m Mae. Marian’s friend,” she adds, a tinge defensively. Did Marian not tell her family Mae was coming today? Maybe she changed her mind. Maybe they’ll send her straight back home.

“Remember to take off your shoes.” Sam, Marian’s brother, who is maybe seven or eight, lets her come inside, yawning like he just woke up from a nap. 

The house seems to glow with light from about a hundred antique Victorian lamps- someone here must collect them- and decorated in a way that reminds her more of the homes on Gibraltar than the ones she’s been to in England. The sitting room is overtaken by a glorious crimson and gold rug, there’s blue and white ceramic plates hanging on the walls in the dining room, and there’s a big painting behind a sofa which looks like it might be of some of Marian’s family- her grandparents or aunts and uncles, maybe? They look at Mae and murmur to each other as Sam leads her upstairs. 

The house has three floors; Marian’s bedroom is on the second, and Sam says their parents are on the third, working. “Maman’s in her dark room,” he recounts to Marian, “and Baba’s writing a murder scene.”

“What?” 

“He’s a writer,” Sam yawns again, rubbing at his eyes. “He writes loads of books. Mahmoud Darvesh. You never heard of him? He’s wrote _The Reflection of Lethe_ , and _The Soul Stopper_ , and _Cursed Prayers_ … He writes about grownup things, mostly. S’really boring,” he shrugs. “I want him to write about aliens.”

“I like aliens,” Mae says. “Did you see _The Mysterious Invader_? It’s about an alien who comes to earth and kills these gangsters. The American title was better. _The Astounding She-Monster_. The gangsters would shoot her,” she mimes firing a pistol, “and the bullets just bounce off her, like Superman. Then this stupid geologist kills her so he can rescue his drippy girlfriend.”

Sam nods along sagely as if this all makes sense to him. They’re interrupted by a door swinging open suddenly. Marian comes out into the narrow hallway, eyes wide. “Sammy! Why didn’t you tell me Mae was here already?” she snaps at her brother, shaking her hand at him. He pulls a face and scoots off into his own bedroom. The music gets much louder; he’s listening to the radio, before he slams his own door shut. 

“Hi,” Mae says to Marian, who is still fuming.

“Sorry,” she says, leading Mae into her own bedroom, which is about as neat as Mae expected, although the wallpaper is an interesting combination of green and gold, and she’s got all sorts of hats and scarves hanging on her wrought iron headboard. “He’s so clueless.”

“He seems alright to me,” Mae closes the door after them. She’s never actually been in another girl’s room before, like this. It’s interesting. She scans Marian’s made bed, the purple and white quilt, the window seat overlooking the garden out back, the tidy bookshelves and desk in the corner, the mirror hanging on the door. 

“How long is the wedding supposed to be, again?” Mae asks, sitting down on the edge of Marian’s twin bed.

“Starts at one o’clock, ends at seven,” Marian recounts. “Suppose they want everyone out of there past dinner so they can clean up that night.”

Mae’s relieved it’s not later in the day. If the reception were taking place at night she might stick out like a sore thumb- they’d be asking why she wasn’t with the rest of the children in the nursery or at the kiddie table or something. 

But she and Marian can only argue about the wedding for so long- they’ll both be there tomorrow, won’t they? After a half hour they give up on debating the merits of where the best location for eavesdropping might be, and begin acting like, well, children. Marian shows her all her carefully curated collection of fashion magazines, both magical and muggle, and they spend a good hour flipping through them, comparing colors and patterns, Mae resisting the urge to cut some pictures out with a pair of scissors so she can paste them into a collage. 

Then they play wizarding chess for a while; Mae’s fairly good with chess, just doesn’t practice much, so she always loses the first two matches before rebounding completely. She’d be lying if she said there was no smug satisfaction in watching the smile fall off Marian’s face at that. Then Sam comes in to tell Marian that their favorite radio show is on, and they all sit on the floor in Sam’s bedroom, listening to it in there- it’s some kind of comedy variety hour and Mae doesn’t get most of the jokes but finds it funny anyways because of the silly voices they put on. 

Finally that goes off the air, and Mae can smell food cooking downstairs, so Marian insists they wash up for dinner. Mae dutifully follows the Darvesh siblings into their bathroom and washes and dries her hands, watching while Marian wets her fingers and smooths her little brother’s hair from his face while he struggles to pull away, whining. The only siblings she’s ever been around are Joel and Isaac, and it’s not the same with them- they’re always wrestling around and playing games. Marian is a proper big sister- even when she’s rolling her eyes at Sam it’s clear she loves him very much, and he doesn’t jerk away from her as much as he could.

Downstairs a woman who must be Mrs Darvesh, Marian’s mother, is setting out plates of food on the dining room table, but doesn’t seem interested in sitting down herself. 

“Maman, you won’t eat?” Marian asks, frowning, then blushes when she realizes Mae overheard her call her mum that. From her tone it seems like this happens a lot.

“I had a late lunch,” her mother replies distractedly, before seemingly noticing Mae’s presence. “Ah, good evening!” She sticks out her hand for Mae to shake across the table; her nail polish is chipping. Mrs Darvesh is pretty; her skin is a little darker than Marian and Sam’s olive tone and her hair has more of a curl to it, although it’s mostly tucked under a dark umber coloured scarf. Her eyes are very bright, and are also the darkest brown Mae has ever seen, a shade shy of black. “Call me Vida, alright? Maisie, isn’t it?”

“Mae,” Mae corrects, but smiles politely. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

“You like lamb?” Vida doesn’t really wait for a reply, but hands over a plate. “Eat up. I’ve got to run back upstairs and finish this portfolio- you know, lots of potential clients tomorrow! Exciting, right? Good you’re coming, you know? Marian- she’s a very lonely girl, I think.”

Marian looks as if she wants to crawl under the table. Vida ruffles Sam’s hair, disturbing the temporary slick Marian had created, and hurries back upstairs.

“Is your dad coming down for dinner?” Mae asks, picking up her spoon.

“He’s eating in his study, probably,” Marian is very invested in pouring a glass of water from the pitcher. 

“Why can’t we eat in our rooms?” Sam complains.

“Because it’s dinner time, and this is what people do at dinner time,” she snaps. “They eat together.”

Her brother shoves a spoonful of beans into his mouth, wrinkling his nose.

They mostly eat in silence, but the stew is very good.

Mae doesn’t sleep very well that night; the pullout bed in Marian’s room is fine, but the house sounds odd to her at night and she imagines she can hear the distant click-clack of Mr. Darvesh’s typewriter until dawn. She wakes up late, tired and more than a little grumpy, especially when faced with the idea of putting on a dress, stockings, and tight shoes. Still, she very much enjoys the tomato-and-egg omelettes Vida makes them for breakfast, even if the tea is so strong and scalding that it burns her tongue and the roof of her mouth. Afterwards, they help Vida organize her cameras and bags, then examine the portkey she’s been given that will bring them straight to the Rosier estate- it’s very small, an old bronze key that they’ll all have to lay a finger or two on. 

One of the many benefits of having chin-length hair is that Mae doesn’t have to bother much with it; she whole-heartedly rejects Marian’s offer of a bow or barette to clip back her bangs, although she does accept some lip gloss, mostly because she thinks it might taste good. It doesn’t, not really, but she likes squinting with intrigue at the sudden sparkly sheen of her lower lip in the mirror until Marian makes her get out of the way. 

Mae’s dress is terrible. Well, it’s in fashion, but it’s terrible, and she privately vowed never to wear it unless it was a life or death situation when she opened it up a year ago, and here she is. The situation might not be quite so fatal, but it seems close enough. She’s just glad it’s not pink. Mae has nothing against pink as a color, but she’s never liked the way it makes her look a little too much like a cosseted porcelain doll. The dress is slate blue taffeta with a lace bib front attached to the frilly collar. The sleeves are capped, there’s a very itchy nylon petticoat to puff out the skirt, and there’s a ‘matching jacket’ with pearly buttons that she honestly intends to burn at some point. She’s only bringing it in case it turns cold and rainy later on today.

“You look pretty,” Marian tells her, matter of factly. “It makes your eyes pop.”

“I don’t want my eyes to pop,” Mae mutters. “I like them just fine as they are.”

Marian’s dress is pink. Even worse, pastel pink, but it doesn’t look half bad on her because she’s not pale or splotchy; it won’t wash her out or make her look sort of meek and sickly. It has a purple velvet ribbon for a belt and the skirt is even more billowy than Mae’s. That makes her feel a bit better, at least. The sleeves are really puffy, like those of a princess in a story book. “You look pretty, too,” she says, and Marian does- Mae has never really seen her wear anything other than their ugly school uniforms or sensible jumpers and long skirts. 

Marian shrugs, as if doubtful of Mae’s truthfulness, which might be fair, given her track record so far, and they go downstairs. Vida is wearing a fancy satin and lace blouse with a deep, ruffled collar and matching opal earrings. She has a black bolero jacket over it that matches with her pencil skirt, and she is pacing back and forth in her sensible shoes in the kitchen, lecturing a bearded, tired looking man who must be Mr. Darvesh in the kitchen about what to feed Sam for lunch. Sam is out in the garden, playing with a neighbor’s son; they’re pushing around a red Radio Flyer wagon with a bunch of green army men in it.

Finally Marian’s parents stop talking to each other, and Vida comes over with the portkey, which they take into the sitting room. She puts it flat on the carpeted floor, where it starts to glow and twitch, and Marian, Mae, and her each put two fingers on it. The resulting twisting and shaking is bad enough that for a moment Mae thinks her fingers have popped right off and she’s going to have a hook hand for the next eighty years. But really it just dumps them on the end of the Rosiers’ very, very long drive. Vida blows out a long breath at the sight of the sprawling stone manor house in the distance, surrounded by rolling green, and the treeline and faint gleam of the river behind it. Marian looks amazed; Mae can already see her sketching it out in her head, and keeps up a steady stream of murmured compliments for the very long walk up to the house that follows.

They don’t even go into the house; two house elves lead them all the way around the side and into the gardens out back, where several large tents have been erected, gleaming white in the afternoon sunshine. It’s a warm, seasonable day and the flowers are all in early, artificial bloom; Mae surveys them with her hands on her hips, somewhat unnerved by the sight of roses in full bloom in the middle of April anywhere outside of a greenhouse. Mum would say this is the most gaudy, ostentatious, wasteful event she’s ever attended, and she’d probably be right. The ceremony is supposedly going to be a smaller affair than the reception, but the area is already crawling with guests, likely pushing a good hundred people, all milling about in their best clothes. 

Vida leaves them to go confer with the harried looking wedding planner, and Marian and Mae exchange suddenly cautious glances. Now that they’re really here, in the moment, Mae can admit to feeling a tiny bit of trepidation. She’s never even been to a wedding before, or any kind of event to this scale. There’s no music or dancing yet, just people walking around and speaking with each other or hurrying here and there. She looks around for any sight of the bride, but just picks out a few bridesmaids giggling with each other, all dressed in pale green with flower crowns in their perfectly coiffed hair. 

Despite wanting no more than to find some corner to skulk about in, Mae forces a brave face. She can’t exactly hide and wait for something or someone to find her. This is a secret mission, that’s the whole point. She has to actually begin it. “Let’s split up,” she announces to Marian. “Do a loop of the gardens, see what’s going on. If you find Ambrose, ask him if he’s seen anyone important. Or dodgy. Or both.”

Marian looks a little uncomfortable at the thought of that, but nods; she goes to the right, Mae goes to the left, heading down a set of stone steps, wincing at every rustle of her taffeta skirt. But for the most part, no one seems to be staring right at her or glaring or following her. No one really pays her much attention at all, although a passing older witch smiles and compliments her ‘pretty dress’. Mae turns into what seems like sort of a hedge maze, gravel crunching underfoot, and then gasps when a sleek black greyhound jumps out of the bushes ahead of her, growling playfully. She backs up slightly, in case it’s some kind of guard dog, but it just barks at her and then races off again. 

Eventually she does start to hear snippets of conversation, and stops every so often to listen in without being seen, occasionally ducking out of sight. Most of it’s very boring; people complaining about the waiting period before the start of the ceremony, speculation about what the dress will look like, some debate over if the weather will hold… She does hear one man who doesn’t sound too happy, but he’s ranting to a friend about his wife’s ‘mood swings’, and Mae doesn’t care to hear more about that. 

She continues on her way, picking a winding path through the gardens, passing under a hanging rose trellis at one point, moving around a burbling fountain, and nearly getting hit with a watery bullseye from one of the cackling stone cherubs. Evil little creatures. She thinks she distantly hears someone calling the bridesmaids and groomsmen for a photo together, but the voice is lost on the spring breeze rustling through the trees and bushes. This almost reminds her of the nature preserve on the Mons Calpe, but it’s too manicured, and there aren’t any animals except a few songbirds and the greyhound- there might be two dogs out here, she isn’t quite sure.

She’s about to turn around when she hears something odd; someone is speaking softly nearby, not at a normal volume, as if trying to keep their conversation even more private. Mae turns on her heel, then darts off the gravel path and onto the grass, despite the numerous signs warning against walking on it. She doesn’t want them to hear her moving around nearby. She continues along the hedgerow; it sounds like a man is speaking to someone on the other side of it, then stops when she judges she’s close enough to listen without being caught.

“ _You don’t look very pleased_ ,” he’s saying. “ _Felt the vibrations, did you? Have we scared all the prey away_?”

Mae mouths along with it to herself in confusion, before she actually hears the intonation of the words, and realizes with a start that he isn’t speaking English. 

“ _I know_ ,” an almost reassuring sort of statement. “ _But it’ll be over by tonight. Come here. Let’s see if you’re of any use._ ”

Mae crouches down so she can peer through a brief gap in the hedge. She sees a man’s black trousers and silvery grey dress robes hanging around them like an overcoat, then leans back as he bends down, his back to her, to pick something up from the ground. Not something. A snake. She watches the man, who’s been speaking in Parseltongue all the while- she’s never heard it from anyone else, and it sends a thrill down her spine, a giddy sense of not being alone, that someone else can do that- let a common garter snake slither up his arm, the end of its tail coiled around his thin wrist. 

“ _Too many people_ ,” the snake is hissing plaintively. “ _Don’t like the… smells. The dogs are digging around. Stop them, warmblood._ ”

“ _I agree_ ,” the man says, and Mae catches a brief glimpse of his profile, and almost falls over. It’s him. The Minister is speaking to snakes. He’s a parselmouth. Obviously she knows she can’t be the only one in the world, but to think that he, of all people, is one too- Mae feels a strange mixture of excitement and dread. “ _Too many people for my liking as well. But it’s how these things are done. Not so simple for us as it is for you, finding a mate_.”

“ _Find a mate_ ,” the snake reasons, “ _dig a nest. Hatch. Hunt._ ”

“ _Hm_ ,” Minister Gaunt says. “ _Yes. When you put it like that_ …” He almost sounds like he’s… teasing it? Having… fun? Mae is more than bit unnerved by the whole thing. He’s talking to them the way she does, like… like the snakes are people, even though they’re not, but it’s fun to talk to them like they are, to get their perspective on things, because it’s all so simple and natural to them- warm or cold, hungry or full, alive or dead. 

A dog barks nearby. The snake hisses in displeasure. “ _Put me down, warmblood. I want to live to see another dusk_.”

“ _Don’t we all_ ,” he says, but lets the snake slither back down from his arm and onto the relatively safe ground. “ _Before you go_ ,” Gaunt says, and the snake raises its shining green head in his direction, swaying slightly. “ _Tell me, do you smell anyone nearby_?”

The forked tongue darts out. Mae runs. By the time she stops, she’s well free of the hedgerows and shrubbery, and reasonably sure he hasn’t followed her. But did he see her? Did he hear her, or just guess someone might have been spying? What if he saw her? She doesn’t think he did, unless he has eyes in the back of his head, but what if he did? Hopefully not her face, but the color of her dress, or her hair- She wishes more people here were wearing blue. Maybe she really should have worn pink instead. Her face is flushed and her stomach hurts. 

When Marian finds her, she looks concerned. “Are you alright? You’re sort of red.”

“Fine,” Mae says tightly. How can she tell Marian she almost blew the entire operation right off the bat. “Just- it’s very warm out, for April, isn’t it?”

Marian shrugs. “Maybe they have weather charms going.” A bell tolls nearby. “That’s the chapel. Come on, the ceremony’s starting. Did you hear anything good?”

“No,” Mae says tightly. “Not really. You?”

Marian shakes her head. “Unless you count someone arguing about the cost of the tablecloths with the caterer, no.”

The pain in her stomach doesn’t go away, twisting and turning throughout the procession to the small stone chapel on the property. Fortunately they’re at the very back, but every so often Mae can just make out the distant gleam of Tom Gaunt’s dark head of hair. Vida is taking pictures of everyone walking ahead of them, and Mae helps hold her bag with Marian, keeping her head down and studying the ground until they file into the back of the chapel. It must have been constructed ages, maybe in medieval times, even, but it’s clearly been magicked to be much more spacious on the inside than the outside. 

Oddly enough, the bride is the one waiting for them all, neatly arrayed before the small altar, clutching a small bouquet of white roses and lilies. Mae takes in the sight of Lydia Rosier’s dress for a moment- it doesn’t look like a traditional bridal gown, it’s calf length silk organza with a sheer, floral embroidered overshirt over an A-line sweetheart dress. The sleeves are bishop sleeves; long and puffy and capped at the end. She has on shining white gloves and her belt is a shimmering pearlescent pink ribbon. Thousands of tiny flowers and vines are embroidered across the bodice and skirt. Her strawberry blonde hair is pinned back in gentle, rolling curls and her lipstick is cherry red. She seems to all but glow in the shaft of light through the stained glass windows. 

She is really, truly beautiful- like someone out of a fairy tale. It’s almost enough for Mae to briefly forget her discomfort and fear, at least until Tom Gaunt takes his place beside her. The two exchange beaming smiles and hold hands as the officiant steps up to the altar- it’s not even a priest or minister of some kind, Mae thinks in momentary detached amusement- what’s the point of even holding it in this chapel, except that it looks pretty. But that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s just one big… stage. Like being on the set of a romance film. Mum would be rolling her eyes and pointing out all the little hypocrisies to Mae. 

Marian looks utterly entranced, in contrast to her usual cynicism. Vida is moving around the aisles, snapping photo after photo from different angles. The officiant drones on and on about love, and trust, and commitment. Mae wonders if anyone means any of it. Maybe Gaunt really does love her. Maybe they’re going to be very happy together. They’re certainly smiling and blushing like it. They exchange rings and promise to never be parted from one another. The officiant smiles broadly, and pronounces them man and wife. For all the lead-up to it, it seems to have passed very quickly. Mae watches as these two strange people kiss, and the chapel bursts into applause and cheers. She feels a wave of nausea to the point where she thinks she might vomit.

Afterwards, the reception begins in the gardens, and everyone follows the smiling and waving bride and groom out. Mae is glad she’s not on the end of her pew, so she doesn’t have to avoid eye contact with Tom Gaunt. But maybe she shouldn’t. If he didn’t see her, and isn’t sure who was listening in on him, that would just make her look suspicious and guilty. Besides, what is he going to do? She didn’t do anything wrong. But that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the point. He might have done something wrong, not her. That’s why she’s here in the first place. 

Does Mum know he’s a parselmouth? Is that why she always was so paranoid about Mae being one? Because he used it do bad things, and she’s afraid Mae might do that, too? But Mae’s got nothing to do with Tom Gaunt. That’s like saying just because someone evil speaks Portugeuse, everyone else who speaks it has something wrong with them, too. There’s got to be hundreds of people all over the world who can speak Parseltongue, maybe even thousands. Mum said it was random. It just happens, like being left handed or something like that. And maybe he isn’t even evil. Loads of criminals aren’t evil. Jaime Isola is a criminal and he’s probably not evil. Well, maybe a little, but mostly not. He only killed that hit wizard out of self defence, she’ll bet. Or maybe not. Mae suddenly feels very uncertain about quite a bit. 

“You really don’t look well,” Marian is saying. “I’ll get you some punch.” They’re sitting under one of the tents, at one of dozens of tables, all full of chattering guests. Maybe she just has to use the bathroom or something. Her stomach still hasn’t settled down, and while she can smell food cooking, it just makes her feel even more sick. 

Mae stands up and slowly makes her way out from under the tent, towards the house. She’s acting like a timid little baby. She knew this was going to be dangerous going into it. Obviously. And now look at her- chickening out at the first opportunity, because what? She heard the Minister speaking to a snake? Big deal. She can do that. She’s spoken to way more dangerous snakes than a garter. She can do loads of dangerous things. She’s not afraid. She’s not afraid of him, she’s not afraid of a stupid wedding and its stupid snotty guests, and she’s not afraid of those greyhounds, and if anyone bothers her she’s going to pick up her skirt and kick them right in the-

The first door she tries open, and she slips into the house with a sigh of relief. It’s much cooler in here, and it doesn’t reek of fake flowers or wedding food or freshly mowed grass. Mae glances around, the continues down the hall that takes her out into the foyer. There has to be a bathroom upstairs, right? The house seems utterly empty. She climbs the staircase quickly, taking them two at a time, then reaches the landing, then the top. She likes the sound her shoes make on the smooth, freshly polished floors, but there’s rugs up ahead which muffle the sound.

Mae turns right, down another hallway, and passes by several bedrooms, a closet, another closet- She pauses when she comes to a corner. More voices, and this time no one is speaking to a snake. It’s two grown men, arguing with each other, and not bothering to be quiet. She stays where she is, confident that she will hear them coming and be able to duck into a room before they see her. One of them sounds sort of familiar, actually, although she can’t quite place his voice without seeing him.

“You shouldn’t even have come,” the more familiar sounding of the two is saying. He doesn’t sound angry, not really, just worried. “I understand your concern, but this isn’t the time or the place-,”

“I’ve been trying to tell him,” the other is snapping, “this needs to be sorted out before it becomes a problem. A real problem, not an easy hush-up in the back pages of the Prophet. Right now we have one too many loose ends running about. Someone needs to start trimming. Between that bastard Isola getting away- do you know I’ve got Grace Taylor practically on my doorstep every other day, begging me to find her husband’s murderer? It’s a nightmare. Not to mention Mulciber’s acting up again- they still haven’t found the body of that girl, and the Obliviator’s Office is throwing a fit at the idea of having to interfere with muggle police again, the family’s hired a private detective-”

“I understand,” the familiar man says, trying to calm the other one down. “Really, I do. But you need to be patient. Have a little faith, alright? We’ve kept ahead of everything so far. If you ask me, the main focus should be Greengrass. Tuft’s been in contact with her, we have proof of that, and the legal- it’s the legal things we need to be worried about, the bloody lawyers, before we dirty our hands with the rest of it. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” the other man snaps. “I just hadn’t realized you’d turned into his publicist, Norbrook.”

Mae tenses. That’s it. That’s where she knows him from. It’s Professor Carmody’s husband. The awkward one with the glasses. 

“Don’t flatter me,” Norbrook says dryly, not rising to the bait. “He has far more confidence in the likes of you than me, Michael.”

The other man, Michael- who does she know who’s a Michael, wait, could it be- grunts in acknowledgement. “Maybe. Funny way of showing it, at times. You should have seen him when he heard Taylor was dead and Isola had vanished. I started wishing I’d worn a nicer suit to my own funeral.”

The two of them chuckle a little at that, with a sort of weary, bitter humor. “Get going before one of the elves realizes you’re here,” Norbrook says. “You know them. Always reporting to their masters. I don’t trust these Rosiers.”

“You don’t trust anyone,” Michael snorts, “besides your precious wife.”

Arthur Norbook sounds genuinely pleased. “She’s a rare breed.”

“She’s going to land herself in hot water if she doesn’t start producing some results,” Michael Applewhite, because Mae’s almost certain that must be who it is, Christine said he was a hit wizard, he was looking for Jaime Isola- “She’s missed the last two meetings. This is why there was such a protest when he inducted her in the first place. These women, I’m telling you, Art, they run around like chickens with their heads cut off-,”

Norbrook’s amiable sort of tolerance seems to evaporate immediately. “You need to go. Now.”

“Don’t get your feathers ruffled, too, now-,”

“I’m serious, Applewhite,” he says coldly. “For your sake and mine.”

“Christ,” Michael Applewhite mutters. “Alright. Don’t tell him I stopped by. I’ve got a week of leave left with Ellie and the kids before I’m back to work.”

Arthur Norbrook says something else, but Mae is on her guard now, and already finding a doorknob to turn. She ducks into a bathroom as she hears footfall around the corner, and leans against the door, eyes shut, until it passes. Then she carefully locks it, and realizes there’s another door- this bathroom is adjoined with someone’s bedroom. Mae locks that door too, just to be safe, even if everyone else is likely still outside. She really does have to pee. 

After some struggle, she manages to get situated, and then gasps in alarm. Hastily grabs a roll of toilet paper, wraps it around her hand, wipes frantically at her stockings and underwear. It’s not a lot of blood, and she knows what this is, Mum told her before she even started at Hogwarts, in case she got it during class one day, because no one ever told Mum what to expect, and she thought she was dying or something-

But there’s still blood and it’s just… She didn’t think it would happen so soon, well, she’s not- she doesn’t feel like this ought to be happening right now, it’s not fair, and her stomach hurts really bad, and there’s a lot more blood when she wipes again. Mae tries to clean herself up as best she can, then flushes the toilet, once, twice, wiping at her stinging eyes. She is not going to cry. She is not going to cry. She’s not a baby, she’s practically an adult now. Still, there’s a swollen lump in her throat. She washes her hands aggressively, checks the back of her skirt, and then cautiously leaves the bathroom. There’s no sign of Applewhite or Norbrook. She hurries down the hall and back down the stairs, then slows down, wincing. 

As she makes her way back outside she just stops walking entirely, because it just feels weird and her stomach really does hurt, cramping badly now that she knows what it is. Mae sits down on a stone bench, and that’s where Marian finds her some ten minutes later. “Where were you?” she demands. “I came back to the table and you were just- gone! And then I saw Ambrose, and he said he saw you going inside- you weren’t following someone, were you? Come on, get up, they’re starting the buffet line.”

Mae tries to say something snide, but just starts crying instead. She doesn’t know why. Well, she does. She just doesn’t want to say that she really, really wants her mum right now. Marian looks completely taken aback, then quickly sits down next to her, lowering her voice as a waiter passes them. “What’s wrong? Are you really sick? Did you eat something bad?”

Mae whispers in her ear, still crying a little, and then looks away, completely humiliated.

Marian looks at her, then tentatively pats her shoulder. “Alright. Stay here. I’ll get my mum. She can apparate you back to our house, or Hogsmeade. Where do you want to go?”

Mae wants to insist she stay here, but she also wants to get away from here and never, ever come back. She sort of wants to pretend today never happened, because the Minister is a parselmouth like her and Professor Carmody and her husband are probably Knights of Walpurgis and Christine’s dad is definitely not a good person and weddings are horrible and fake and Gaunt maybe knows she was spying on him, and even if he doesn’t, Mae doesn’t know how she’s going to tell Mum any of this without Mum realizing Mae knows things she’s not supposed to it and it all seems like a very big mess that she’s slowly sinking in the middle of.

“I want to go home,” she says, tearfully, and Marian nods and squeezes her shoulder, then rushes off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lost my chapter notes while typing them up so I'm very annoyed right now.
> 
> Some Notes (again):
> 
> 1\. Next chapter should be divided between Tom & Amy. We'll see a bit more of the wedding and a very informative honeymoon. Plus a mother and daughter confrontation, everyone's favorite. 
> 
> 2\. Mae is still only twelve so I feel as though one can only expect so much success from her James Bond-esque endeavors and detective work. At least she's trying? I know her cold attitude towards Amy is a bit frustrating, but she does have some legit grievances with her mother, aside from the tween angst. 
> 
> 3\. The Darveshes love their children but I think Marian's home life explains a lot about her sort of highly controlled and responsible, 'mature for her age' personality. She's used to sort of being the parent to her brother while their own parents are consumed by their respective artistic careers. 
> 
> 4\. Tom was not trying to lure Mae into some kind of absurdly calculated trap, he genuinely did not know she would be at this affair, and it's not clear if he even knows it was her, specifically, spying on him in the gardens. Mae does not know that parseltongue is typically an inherited magical trait. She's not omniscient either and I didn't want her to jump straight to 'oh, clearly this is my dad!' As far as she still knows, her father is a dead muggle soldier. 
> 
> 5\. Lydia's dress is based off the one Grace Kelly wears in the 1958 film High Society. It's sort of a unique design for a wedding dress even for the 50s. 
> 
> 6\. Norbrook, Applewhite, and Carmody all seem to be Knights of Walpurgis, given what Mae's just overheard. Obviously not ideal, since they're, you know, her neighbors and she's in Carmody's class every day and all. Norbrook may be a deceitful ass, but he's quite protective of June. The couple that schemes together...
> 
> 7\. Mae may be growing up but she is still a child in need of comfort and reassurance. Her getting her first period at the most inconvenient time ever was a nasty shock for her. She will obviously mature over the course of this story, but it's not going to be an immediate switch from a child's mindset to an adult woman's. She's still learning and growing. 
> 
> 8\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	20. Tom III - Amy VIII

LANCASHIRE, APRIL 1958

Their first dance as a married couple is mercifully short; Tom’s been on his feet for most of the day and while he’s never been one to admit or even acknowledge weakness, he is tired. They don’t warn you just how draining weddings can be, particularly when you are one of the main players. He’s been to his share of weddings, as a guest of one person or another, even attended two with Lydia last summer. He was bored out of his mind during most of them, but at least he didn’t have to worry much about everything proceeding as planned. 

He would have been all for a quick elopement and some signed papers in a government office if not for the optics of it all. He’s the most powerful politician in Britain at the moment; he’s not afforded an ‘easy’ anything. The magical press is just as ravenous as the muggle, and this is a crucial time for him. He needs at least one piece of major legislation passed by the end of this summer, or he’ll risk being painted as ineffective and indecisive by the opposition. Power isn’t really power if you’re unwilling or unable to wield it properly; otherwise it’s just a blunted knife, and he is many things, but rarely blunt. 

Lydia twirls happily in his arms; he doesn’t think it’s an act tonight, at least. For all her self-congratulatory little smirks and smiles and chuckles, he’s usually able to tell when she’s being insincere. Today is one of the rare occasions when he hasn’t detected a hint of masks or veils to her. Well, aside from her appearance, of course, but unwrapping that particular loaded gift can wait until later. She seems genuinely thrilled to be married, genuinely pleased to be here with him, and while he would not say he is happy, exactly, he is content. He should be happy, anyways. Perhaps it’s just the setting. The Rosier estate has always involved him trailing after his bride-to-be, making nice with her mother and father, tolerating her brother’s ignorance, petting those frankly ugly dogs and pretending that the odd house elf popping in and out doesn’t bother him.

But that’s done with now. Lydia’s not Lydia Rosier anymore, she’s Lydia Gaunt, and he owes absolutely nothing to her family anymore. They’ve gotten what they were promised, and that’s the end of that. He doesn’t need to placate, humor, or pacify for a moment longer. If anything, they should be at his feet rejoicing at his generosity. He didn’t need to marry Lydia right away. He could have pushed for a longer engagement, insisted on waiting until he was settled as Minister. She’s young; there would be no harm in delaying the marriage itself. But he had nodded and smiled and agreed with all their demands, and now he finally stands some chance of reaping the benefits of it. 

Lydia doesn’t answer to her father, her mother, or her iron-eyed aunt any longer, but to him, and he is willing to wager he’ll be a good deal more amenable a taskmaster than they ever were, poking and prodding and needling at her, tutting and clucking about this and that, so focused on a thousand inanities and archaic traditions. Were he in her shoes, he’d have been desperate to marry the first man who came knocking as well. Anything would have to be better than life under their thumb; it’s a wonder they didn’t smother her to death years ago.

She doesn’t look in danger of being smothered now; she is flushed and breathless, some of her pinned curls coming a little loose, the skirt of her flowery gown slightly crumpled by their dance. Her chest is heaving, not because they were moving particularly strenuously but because he suspects she’s so tightly laced into the gown that she might as well be sewed in. “You should sit down,” he says, as the music finally dies away; he hadn’t even been paying attention to whatever silly song the live band was playing. “We wouldn’t want the blushing bride fainting on us.”

Their early dinner ended a little while ago, and she barely touched any of it, rising every few moments to scurry over to this or that table, greeting and chattering away, kissing babies and ‘old friends’ on the cheek, anxiously consulting on if the wine was good enough or if the meal was to their liking or if they wanted their table moved over. Tom had eaten mechanically, watching her move through the crowded tent, ignoring the hushed argument Lyle was having with his wife to the left of him. To the right, Lydia’s mother was complaining about the photographer to her father. 

Tom had mostly tuned it out; if there was something wrong with the pictures later, they’d have someone handle it, at least until he’d heard something about the woman briefly leaving the wedding to take a little girl home- her daughter, likely. He remembers a brief glimpse of the girl, talking to the Bulstrode boy, clutching a cup full of punch. “I certainly hope it wasn’t food poisoning,” he’d said, but Cordelia had lighted upon this-

“No,” she’d tsked, “no, I asked her myself when she came back- she said the girl didn’t even touch the food. Still. Dreadfully unprofessional, if you ask me- Lydia is a dear girl, really, but she had no business telling the woman to bring her daughter and her daughter’s little friends along-,”

Tom had paused while cutting his lamb chop in half. “The daughter brought friends?”

“Just the one,” Gilbert Rosier had roused himself from his post-meal stupor to comment. “Delia, you’re exaggerating, as usual. She was gone for less than ten minutes, and it was while everyone was getting their plates.”

Just the one. Tom still isn’t very concerned; he knows someone’s child was eavesdropping on him and the snake in the gardens, but he’d assumed it was one of the Black girls. Bellatrix, likely, she seemed impudent enough. What of it? Even if she’d recognized he was speaking Parseltongue, the odd rumor or two of it would only improve his standing with families like her own. But now he wonders. 

He’s still wondering, in fact, as Lydia brushes off his concern. 

“I’m fine, really- I could dance another!” She looks up at him eagerly, green eyes roving across his face as if searching for some sign. 

Tom smiles briefly. “You’ve better stamina than me, then. Why don’t you dance the next with Abraxas; he’s looking rather forlorn without Ada to console him.” Adeline Malfoy, nee Burke, had at some point vanished inside to tend to some ailment of their son’s. Lucius, they’re calling the boy, and he furthers the commonly stated belief that the Malfoy family produces exactly one face. He looks almost identical to his father; if Abraxas was capable of asexual reproduction, Tom would believe it immediately. Fragile looking child, really. Not nearly as hardy as the Black sisters; Bellatrix appears to be sliding across the dance floor in her stockings, shoes nowhere to be seen, coaxing the more hesitant Andromeda to follow suit. 

“Alright.” Lydia presses another kiss to his cheek, then flags down Abraxas, who rouses himself from his seat, but makes a brief stop at Tom first. 

“Just thought you should know,” he murmurs, “one of the house elves is swearing Applewhite came round for a brief visit.”

Tom exhales slightly in exasperation. “Is he still here?”

“No, thankfully. Can you imagine? The Carrows still want his head on a spike for taking down that cousin of theirs in Devon.” Abraxas gives him a beleaguered sort of smile, then plasters on a more enthusiastic expression as he approaches Lydia, complimenting her gown yet again. 

Tom debates returning to the head table, but decides a brief trip indoors might be a better use of his time. Less small talk, after all, unless by ‘small’ you count the elves. 

Unpleasant business, it is- Tom, unlike many of the people he surrounds himself with, did not grow up with elves, nor does he trust them, for all their professions of loyalty. They’re not loyal to a people but to a home, a house, a physical setting. In the old days they were considered far more dangerous; beings to be appeased and catered to, not used as servants. Modern magical society has made short work of that, and the elves’ numbers have rapidly dwindled as men’s magic advanced and expanded. 

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. They may be denied the use of a wand, but they’ve never needed them in the first place. Infamously in the Rosier family, a great-grandfather was once flung down a flight of stairs by an elf who’d tired of hearing him browbeat, and sometimes physically beat, his wife. Broken neck, end of story. Never publicly admitted- far too shameful, the idea of a wizard being killed by a mere elf. 

Lydia is still set on bringing along her favorite, Kit, to their new home. Tom is going to deny her that, of course, but she’ll get over it eventually, and a new wardrobe and a full social season this summer will likely help her forget it all the quicker. It’s not out of any personal animosity towards her; he just can’t take the risk. She’ll understand as time goes on. The life they live now has so many rewards, but it also has its share of consequences. She can’t keep up the facade of girlish innocence forever, though it is amusing to watch the papers fawn over it. Besides, she’s a good deal better at it than many of her peers. He could have been saddled with some dour-faced wallflower who’d spend the entire evening all but chained to his side, speaking in monotone, dressing as though it were still the Victorian era. At least Lydia can be relied upon to approach things like this with some degree of confidence and assertion. He’s never had to worry about her offending anyone. 

“Tell me,” he says to the elf Kit, who shuffles from one foot to another in the empty kitchen- all the food was prepared hours ago, including the desserts, and merely kept hot until now, “what did Applewhite want?”

“He was speaking to the Mister Norbrook, sir.” Kit is a careful creature; only speaking so far as absolutely necessary, regarding him with forest green eyes, plucking at a loose thread in her faded rags. “About you, sir. The bloody lawyers,” she quotes with uncanny affect. 

Tom understands immediately. He doesn’t need a full-recount of the conversation to know that Applewhite gets chatty when he’s nervous, and Norbrook would be the sort to try to keep it hushed up. A pity June couldn’t attend tonight, but he swears up and down she was swamped with lessons plans, grading- the usual. Tom knows better. June Carmody knows where her bread is buttered, but that doesn’t mean she likes to eat it at the same table as them. Her disdain for most of the older families is well known.

He almost proceeds, then remembers what else he meant to ask. “And tell me,” he says, “did you happen to see the little girl who came with the photographer and her daughter? The Darveshes.”

“Yes,” Kit bobs her head, which is not much larger than a grapefruit. 

“What was her name?” Tom presses.

Kit shrugs. “Kit didn’t hear, sir. She was a pale one, dark hair, all in blue. Pretty blue eyes,” she remarks.

Pale, dark hair, blue eyes. Tom ignores the prickling of unease. It doesn’t mean anything. Plenty of children fit that description beyond Amy’s little whelp. It would be ludicrous to think that she would in a thousand years ever so much as let the child within a hundred feet of him, never mind attend his very wedding. She’s not nearly as cunning as she thinks, but she’s not foolish, either, and she does care for the girl. He resists the urge to feel at the ring on his finger, beside his wedding ring. That much is obvious. 

He obliviates the elf and goes back to the party after that. 

The cake is very impressive; a towering, five tier fruit cake slathered in thick royal white icing, supposedly tinged with premium liquor, topped with even more flowers, as if this affair didn’t have enough of those, although these are artificial, made of spun sugar, crinkling to the touch. Tom places his hand over Lydia’s small one and cuts the first slices with her, smiling for the cameras. They even feed each other the first bite, albeit somewhat self-consciously. 

Tom doesn’t touch his much beyond a polite bite or two. He hasn’t found sweets very appealing since he was a boy, and it reminds him too much, at times, of another girl, who once, when he secured a small cake for her fifteenth birthday, all but jumped up and down in delight, and kissed him with chocolate frosting all over her mouth, laughing loudly when he wrenched away to wipe it off his lips and chin. 

“Come here,” he remembers her taunting, as she took another forkful, “let me get some in your hair.” She’d waved the fork around so much the piece of cake on it had promptly dropped to the floor; he’d lectured her about wasting his hard-earned (well, hard-stolen) money, and she’d laughed but apologized sincerely, as if he actually cared where the cake went. She could have tossed it into the lake and he wouldn’t have cared, so long as she kissed him like that again. It was a poor gift for a fifteen year old girl, anyways. He doesn’t know what he was thinking, except that she liked sweets. 

He should have gotten her something that would last longer than a cake. A cake proved absolutely nothing. It was gone in a day. He realizes now that he was impulsive then, for all his careful consideration for the future. He had no concept of how to properly plan these sort of things. He’d just gone along his daily life, assuming she was all-in at any given moment. Had he been a bit more careful of how he went about things, it might never have ended the way it had. It hardly excuses her behavior, of course. What she did to him. But he can understand, to a degree, that he made mistakes as well. He was a child, still. He’d reasoned with a child’s logic. The warning signs were all there, but he’d been blinded by youth and inexperience, bowled over by the consistent euphoric rush of having her smile and look at him like that.

“I don’t want to be some- some trophy or accessory,” she’d told him, and he exasperatedly went along with it, reasoning it wasn’t worth the trouble to argue with her. Had he bothered to actually listen to what she was saying, he would have realized there was an easy solution to all of this. He could have taken her into his confidence, explained things properly to her, shown her that he knew what he was doing, that this was in both of their best interests, that he had a plan, a real plan, that she didn’t need to be ashamed of him. Instead he’d been more concerned about keeping her entirely to himself, fretting over Matthew Abbott or Joseph Fair or Edward O’Neill or any of the morons she surrounded herself with in Hufflepuff. Instead all he’d succeeded in doing was giving her ideas for future ammunition to use against him. He’d played his hand far too early. 

But it doesn’t matter now. She will never have any of this, and he’d take some smug pleasure in that if not for the cold, razor sharp knowledge that she would not want any of this. Not the hundreds of guests, not the sprawling estate, nor the chapel overflowing with flowers and ribbons, and not the tiered cake with the royal white icing and the saccharine decorations. He’d considered the possibility, of course, that she might marry while she was abroad, might start something up over there. But she never would have come back here, then, not unless he’d taken far more extreme measures. Still, she never had. Tempting as it might be to think that signifies something, of course he knows it does not. It means nothing. 

Lydia eats like a bird, somehow avoiding getting a drop of frosting or spun sugar anywhere on her face, clothes, or hands. She doesn’t scrunch up her nose when she smiles, and her laugh is soft and tinkling, like wind chimes. By the time the cake has been demolished by the guests, the band is packing up, and the Rosiers are politely encouraging people to get going. Tom stands against a pillar, entertaining a very long line of well-wishers, while Lydia belatedly tosses her bouquet into the squealing crowd. Eileen Prince catches it, how could she not, with those long, skinny arms of hers, and promptly turns beet red as the bevy of women turn on her, teasing and snickering. 

Finally, the line before him starts to ebb and flow, and he watches Lydia present a few patient last-minute responses to the two journalists present, then indicate him with a wave of her hand, laugh about how late it was getting, and return to his side. They leave for their honeymoon on the Isles of Scilly in the morning; Lydia is looking forward to the bird-watching, and he wants to examine the castle ruins on St. Mary’s in particular, see if they’re useful for anything, but for tonight it’s the townhouse, which she has already left her mark on but has yet to spend a night in. Or spend a night, anywhere, really, aside from her childhood home. Lydia’s only time outside of the house in all her life was her travel abroad with her aunt a few years ago. Other than that, she’s been essentially house-bound for over two decades.

He lingers, watching as she politely embraces all the members of her extended family, ending with her brother, mother, and father. Lyle cracks some drunken joke about enjoying the wedding night, and Cecily swats him on the arm, smile forcibly attached to her face. Her mother seems vaguely tearful; quite the theatrics, from a woman who’s otherwise treated her daughter like a dress up doll. Her father’s expression barely changes at all; there are no good-natured protective comments about treating his little girl right from this one. If Lydia’s disheartened by her family’s mediocre response to her grand departure from their home, she doesn’t show it.

“Ready?” he asks, as she returns to his side, swatting at a moth. 

She smiles tiredly and links her arm with his, and they’re gone.

The townhouse is mercifully darkened and quiet. Neither of them bother to turn on a light; he carries her suitcase upstairs for her- the rest of her many, many things will be brought over this week while they’re away- and then politely avoids the second floor so she can change and shower, fixing himself a drink instead. He didn’t touch a drop during the wedding, so he feels he deserves it. He finds her lingering on the landing, her hands splayed out across the banister, wrapped in her silk dressing gown, when he returns. Tom smiles at her as he climbs the stairs; she smiles coyly back, then turns and proceeds into the master bedroom. He’s not in any particular hurry, so by the time he enters she is already perched on the edge of the bed. It feels odd to see another person in this room that has been his alone for so long. 

The room is fastidiously neat, and of course he hasn’t left anything in the least incriminating or embarrassing out for her to spot, but it does feel a bit strange, as if they were play-acting at something. He hasn’t done much but remove his dress robes and jacket, so he loosens his tie, glancing in the mirror, watching her reflection behind him. If she’s nervous, she doesn’t show it, holding her hands neatly clasped in her lap as if attending a business meeting. He’s debated how to go about this for some time now, but he feels with her, the most straightforward approach would be the best.

Tom removes his tie, tugging at the tight collar of his dress shirt, and says, careful to keep his voice calm and measured, “You can show me, now.”

She does not move, only glances curiously at him, and undoes the belt of her dressing gown, shrugging it off to reveal her pale shoulders. 

“Don’t you want to wait?” she asks lightly. “Until you’re more comfortable?”

“It’s not my comfort I’m concerned about,” he says. “I know this might be… difficult for you.”

“How difficult could it be?” Lydia tilts her head slightly, like one of her damned greyhounds. “I trust you.”

“Then you know you can show me,” he says, and finally turns around to face her, working on the buttons of his shirt. “Take it off.”

She stares, then stands, completely shrugging off the dressing gown. Her slip is white silk, trimmed with scalloped lace. She’s beautiful, but that’s not what he’s interested in. He wants what’s lurking underneath. It’s become glaringly obvious that his suspicions were correct, unless she’s doing a very good job of pretending otherwise. 

He unbuttons his shirt entirely, and strips it off, stepping out of his shoes at the same time. “Not your clothes,” he says slowly, patiently. “Your face. Your looks. I think every man has a right to see his wife in her natural state on their wedding night, don’t you agree, Lydia?”

For the first time in four years of knowing her, he watches her pupils dilate as though she were a deer in the headlights. She takes half a step back, bumping into the bed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

This getting tedious, but he supposes he’ll indulge it, seeing how well she performed earlier. “You’re a metamorphmagus,” he says. “An unregistered metamorphmagus. Your abilities developed unusually late. They were unusually powerful. They remain unusually powerful. With a wand, you’re average at best. It’s your wandless magic that makes you special. What you can do simply by existing. Show me.”

She swallows. “Who told you?”

“Your parents,” he says in bemusement. “Obviously. Why did you think I agreed to any of this, Lydia? Don’t mistake me, you’re a perfectly lovely young woman, and your pedigree has certainly helped, but that’s not your true value. You must know.” He knows very well she does not.

“I thought,” for the first time the polish, all those smooth surfaces, they’ve vanished, and she is just a young woman, wrapping her arms protectively around herself, staring at him. Her eyes are still green. Interesting. She’s very well-controlled. She’s obviously shocked but not a single facet of her appearance has changed to reflect it. She’s extraordinary. “I thought you agreed because- because Lyle convinced you, because our name-,”

“Your name is important too, of course,” he says, putting on a more comfortable shirt over his undershirt, something he used to wear to work at the shop, now faded and stretched out from a thousand washings. “But that wasn’t what compelled me. Lyle did convince me. Well, your father did, once he explained things. What you could do. How very special you are, Lydia.” He pauses, raises an eyebrow. “I assumed you were aware that I’d been told.”

She says nothing, unmoving. 

“You needn’t be worried,” he says, “if that’s what this is. Obviously I’m not going to report you to the authorities.” He smiles, thinly. He is the Authorities, now. “I’ve just been so curious. You can’t imagine how curious. How extensive is it, your… morphing?” 

Still she is frozen. “I don’t… Can we talk about this in the morning?” There is no cheery brightness in her tone now, no warmth or vigor or charisma. She sounds very young and very tired. “I want to go to bed, Tom.”

“Certainly,” he says, “but you’ll show me, first. We had an agreement.”

“I wasn’t privy to it,” she replies, lowly. 

“I know,” he smiles again. “I’m afraid that’s the way these things often work. Does it make you angry? I would be furious, I think. My whole future decided for me in one fell swoop. But surely you expected something of the sort. What did you think they were preparing you for?”

Her lips move, but no sound emerges, until she collects herself again. “They just wanted to keep me safe.”

Does she honestly believe that? It doesn’t sound like she does. 

“I think this is as safe as it gets,” he says, indicating the room around her. “I promise. What happens in this house, stays here. Do you understand? I know you must. You’re clearly used to keeping secrets, Lydia.”

“You should have told me you knew earlier,” she says, a little firmer. “I- why didn’t you tell me? I thought you- they didn’t tell me you knew-,”

“I’m sure they didn’t want to worry you.” He takes a step towards her. To his relief, she does not balk and flee, as he worried she might. He’d still find out, one way or another, but it’d be a fairly unpleasant experience for both of them. There are more ways to force a metamorphmagus back into their true form, beyond just asking politely. 

She seems to sense that as well. He watches her shoulders draw in, as if she were trying to fold herself up like a paper doll. “It’s not…”

Not what? Not pretty? Does she really think he cares what she actually looks like? She could have a hunchback and a face full of warts, it wouldn’t matter to him. He didn’t marry her for her true looks, he married her for all the other ones. “It’s alright,” he says, as if soothing a frightened wild animal. “You can go as slowly as you like.”

She does not. Her eyes change first; he watches the green fade, into a murkier brown, their size shift slightly smaller. Her lashes shorten and lighten. Her eyebrows thicken and darken as well. Her nose grows larger and slightly longer. The structure of her face shifts entirely; it’s not a heart-shape anymore, more of a long oval. Her hair darkens from its customary strawberry blonde to a darker chestnut brown; not entirely unpleasant, but not nearly as eye-catching. It thins, straightens as well, falls to her waist. Her neck widens slightly; her height doesn’t really seem to change, nor the length of her limbs, but her hourglass figure vanishes. She doesn’t become all that heavier, but her chest is both wider and flatter, her waistline less narrow. Her fingers shorten on her hands. 

The woman standing before him is not ugly; she is simply ordinary looking, the sort of woman you would pass on the street and not look twice at. She still looks twenty three; if anything, she looks slightly younger. Her skin is less peaches and cream, more drab and sallow. She has a small mole on the left side of her neck. The right side of her face, down the side of her temple, narrowly avoiding her eye, continuing down her cheek and onto her neck, is ravaged by old burn scars. A liquid like scalding water, if he had to guess. He can see it on her right arm and hand as well, where she presumably tried to shield herself. The skin is permanently discolored there and slightly wrinkled and shiny. It’s not as horrific as it could be, but it draws the eye and invites it to linger. 

“What happened there?” he muses, not really expecting an answer. She’s barely looking at him; she has angled her face towards the wall, away from the mirror in the corner of the room.

“An accident,” she says. “I tripped while carrying a kettle.” She’s lying. He doesn’t need to look into her thoughts to know that.

“I see,” he says. “Thank you, Lydia. I know this was difficult.”

She says nothing. He realizes that she’s closed her eyes, as if denial of the entire situation. He has a brief memory of once doing the same thing during a scolding, if only to vex and infuriate Mrs Cole further. “I’m sure you’re tired,” he says, not unkindly, after the silence lingers. “I think I’ll be up for a while longer, but you should go to sleep. You’ve had a long day.”

She opens her eyes. One is already green again. The other looks wet with tears, but then she blinks and it’s dry. “You don’t want to consummate it?” she asks simply. 

“I confess I’m not as well-versed in certain traditions as I should be,” he says with a droll edge. “Are we supposed to hang the sheet out the window in the morning?”

She closes her eyes again, as if he’s induced a headache. Maybe he has. He’s been accused of having that effect on people before. “Good night,” she says. She crosses to the side of the bed and starts to turn down the sheets. “Put the light out before you go.”

He does as he’s told. Over all, he thinks that went rather well. He knew she wouldn’t be pleased with him, but it’s not as if he had her strip nude and run a lap around the house, or grow a pair of horns and fangs for him. And now that it’s over and done with, they don’t have to discuss it again until the situation calls for it. He supposes she might have found it humiliating, degrading, but surely she can stand a little shame once in a while. He has. He doesn’t doubt her childhood was difficult. They have that much in common. In a sense, he respects her more after this. She stood her ground and conducted herself well enough. No cringing and crying, no laughable lies. It gives her a sort of depth, he thinks, beyond the pretty, hollow plaster on the outside. 

He hasn’t had a free night like this, without the expectation of getting up at five to be in the office by six for meetings, in months. He makes himself at home in the small study, carefully locking the door behind him and activating the wards, just in case she gets any ideas to come looking for him. He doubts that, though. He might end up sleeping on the sofa downstairs tonight. That’s alright. He spent a summer sleeping on an attic floor, and his bed at Wool’s was hard as concrete. He’s endured worse than a night on the sofa because his wife is a bit miffed she wasn’t let in on this earlier. Really, she ought to be angrier at her family than with him. It was their insistence that she not be told how aware he was until after the wedding had proceeded. Perhaps they worried she’d develop cold feet and make a run for it at the last minute. He can’t see that happening, though. Lydia’s never struck him as the running type. She seems more the sort to sidle up to the bar while the ship is going down, and order one last cocktail. Meanwhile, Amy would be attempting to row to shore on piece of plywood. 

He slides the ring- the Gaunt ring, not his wedding ring- off his finger and onto the cleared off desk in front of him. For the past few months, he’s had very little time to properly examine it Just having it with him at all times once again was enough. But now that he has the whole honeymoon ahead of him, it seems the perfect time to examine it fully. It feels vaguely embarrassing, like coming across an old, shoddily done school project. He was so young when he worked on this. Slughorn pushed him in the right direction, of course, but most of the relevant books and texts were destroyed or heavily censored. It was more a hopeful experiment than anything else. 

Still, all experiments have their value, as any decent researcher would tell you. He turns the ring over in his palm, pulls out his wand, and holds it fast between two fingers. Murmuring the necessary spell under his breath, he probes it with his wand, watching a golden sort of shimmer cascade over the black metal, again and again, until it suddenly lights up in a shower of red sparks. The ring burns in his fingers, he drops it, swearing under his breath, and then feels almost… excited. She tried to tamper with it, he’s sure of. Nevermind that she hasn’t the slightest idea about cursebreaking- or curselaying- she did something to it, or at least tried. He wonders if it burned against her chest all the while, on that chain. 

He tries a slightly amended version of the spell, using a different word in Latin. This time there is no sudden spark shower, but the metal shivers under his touch. He frowns, then tries a more severe spell. It feels… too brittle. Has she damaged it, without him realizing it? His excitement fades, replaced by something more sharp and hard. Fear, or desperation, or something adjacent to it. “Revelio,” he mutters. “Revelio incantatem.” Nothing. He tries a lesser known variant. The he stands up, puts one hand down on the desk, moves his wand in an arc with the other, and suspends it in a glowing orb of silvery light. Tom examines it for a moment, hung in the air, then compresses the orb with a violent motion of his hands. 

The ring cracks in half. He draws back in something like terror for a split second, chest seizing- before he forces himself to examine the two halves, now fallen onto the desk, smoking gently like just stubbed out cigarette butts. This isn’t it. He feels a wave of relief, followed by fury. It wasn’t responding to the spells because it wasn’t what he thought. Oh, it is a ring, and it was enchanted, and doctored to look nearly identical to the one he foolishly gave her, when he thought her worthy of part of his soul, but it is not the same one. She lied, again, and he let her. It’s a fake. She couldn’t have done this alone. Someone must have worked for weeks on this to pull off a credible imitation that would pass the initial examination. 

He prods at one half; it is still a black ring, just not his. She or someone else found a piece of jewelry similar in design, then charmed and enchanted and cursed it to resemble the real thing. He has some of idea of who ‘someone else’ might be. As it turns out, he shouldn’t have been so focused on whether or not she might have tried to pawn it off on Isola, or ask him to break curses on it, to destroy the Horcrux. She didn’t. She had him make her a forgery. One of his many talents, right after resisting arrest and extortion. Tom hopes he charged her an arm and a leg for this. He should have at least made some good money off it, because he hasn’t got much time left to enjoy it. 

He’s not sure if he’s more enraged or impressed at her sheer gall. Even when she thought he meant to kill her, she was still lying to his face. Is that a mark of stupidity, or bravery? Pigheadedness, he decides. That’s just like her. What would it matter, if she really thought she was going to die either way? Spiting him again. That’s what mattered to her. She can pretend all she likes. In reality, she is just as vindictive and calculating and shrewd as he. She thought her last act while living would be to pass off a forgery as the real thing, and somehow guilt him into sparing her loved ones at the same time. The Hat was wrong. It should have put her in Slytherin. He is more certain of that now more than ever before. 

Tom leans back in his chair, sighing slightly. Of course he is still furious. But at least he knows it’s still out there. She can’t have destroyed it. She wouldn’t have dared. It is her last card in the deck, and the only one she can still play with him. Well, for all her talk of going their separate ways, she seems oddly determined to keep reeling him back into her pathetically stubborn existence. Honestly, it almost feels like a challenge. Lucky then he’s always liked those. There’s no triumph in an easy victory, after all, and he’s had so many of those, lately. This will be good for him. A nice change of pace. After he makes her pay for it, of course. Actions do have consequences. 

HOGSMEADE, APRIL 1958

It’s far past Mae’s usual bedtime, but Amy has historically been a very poor mother when it comes to sticking to these things. Mae’s sleep was notoriously erratic as a toddler and small child, and Amy can remember many a night where Mae had stayed up until the early hours of the morning, playing at her feet under her desk while she brewed a potion or read healing texts by lantern light. All in all, she feels every mother is allowed at least one shortcoming, and if letting Mae stay up too late was one of hers, she’d be happy enough.

But it’s far from her only shortcoming as a parent, as is becoming glaringly obvious. Mae’s cramps must have died down, because the hot water bottle is sitting on the bedside table when Amy cautiously enters her room. Mae is lying on her belly, the covers pulled up over her head like a shroud, reading one of the books she got for her birthday a few weeks ago. Her pretty party dress lies discarded and crumpled on the floor, and her shoes are half under her bed, half out. Amy had expected the worst when Marian Darvesh’s mother unexpectedly popped by with a wan Mae in tow, and had fought back the relief upon learning it was just her first monthly cycle. Followed by a wave of horror when Vida explained where they’d just come from. It’d been all she could do to keep a straight face until the other woman had left, citing that she was still on the clock, and Amy had proceeded to mechanically help a shockingly tearful and clingy Mae upstairs, out of her clothes, into a hot shower, and then into bed. 

She’d offered Mae some of the tonics she regularly took when her cramps were especially bad, or if she was feeling queasy, but Mae rejected everything but the hot water bottle, and had retreated to her bed. Amy had sat beside her and stroked her hair and rubbed her back and offered the soothing reassurances no one had ever given her as a little girl. There’d be no one there she when she started bleeding. Locked inside a tiny, drafty bathroom at Wool’s, frantically scrubbing at her underwear in the sink. She’d never heard of anything like this, had known where babies came from but had little concept of how they got there or what preceded it. 

There’d been no giggling over ‘becoming a woman’, just creeping fear and dread of a body she did not understand and which was never discussed in ‘polite company’. Good girls didn’t talk about those things, didn’t profess any knowledge of what to do when they started bleeding and growing breasts and hair and feelings things they weren’t supposed to feel. Amy doesn’t want any of that for Mae, has always tried to be honest with her- about this, anyways, about the important things, like her body and how it works. Mae knows how a man and a woman make a baby and she knows what a menstrual cycle is and she knows that people can do things to prevent having a baby. 

Still, it’s unsettling for both of them. Amy thought they’d have more time. Mae doesn’t seem twelve to her, not really, still seems barely eleven, more like ten, honestly. Of course she’s growing up, Amy’s not in denial, it’s just- what was she thinking, tagging along to the Minister’s wedding without so much as a ‘Mother, may I?’ She doesn’t even like weddings. Or, she shouldn’t, she’s never been to one. Well, Teddy and Patsy’s doesn’t count, she was barely three years old and has no memory of it. Mae is not the sort of girl who happily puts on a dress and goes to some party just for the fun of it. At least, that’s what Amy had thought.

Now she’s faced with a daughter who seemingly puts on a dress for the first time without Amy prodding, who is capable of fixing her hair nicely, who sits quietly in a church pew and who gets her period while out and about, living a life Amy suddenly isn’t privy to. She goes to sleepovers and puts on lip gloss. She wanders gaily through life, oblivious, possibly mere feet from Tom- Amy can’t even think about it. What if he takes it as some kind of taunt, her goading at him, trying to provoke him? Did he see Mae? Did he pick her out in the crowd, was he watching her the entire time, waiting for his chance to- To what, she doesn’t even want to think about it. 

Some part of her can’t conceive of it, but that part of her is foolish and naive, even still. He is perfectly capable of hurting her daughter. Not his daughter. Her daughter. He threatened to kill her. Maybe it was idle, maybe it wasn’t, but she could never take that risk. He threatened to leave Amy childless, as much as they were motherless. She needs to start believing him again. He might be unwilling to directly harm Amy, but he would kill Mae without a second thought. The mere notion of it leaves her breathless and shaky. Watching Mae die before her eyes. Amy has seen a Killing Curse in action before. 

Not from Tom’s wand, not in England, but does it matter the caster or the location or the language? It looked so odd, how they fell. It wasn’t like watching someone being shot or stabbed. They merely… crumpled, already stiffening with death. There were never any screams of pain or visible wounds, no blood or bruises. She remembers what it sounded like. Again, that great rushing of wind, like rattling the eaves of a house. It tore the breath right out of them and they never got it back. Mae is so alive, so full of life and energy, that even imagining her so still and cold seems absurd, impossible. But it is possible. It is very possible.

Anything could have gone wrong at that wedding. Wrong time, wrong place- God, what if he saw her? What if he takes it as some kind of sick challenge? A threat on her part, sending what he believes is her ‘bastard child’ to his picture perfect pureblood wedding? ‘Your move, Tom.’ No. Not his move. Never his move, because she knows very well what that could be. Amy doesn’t care what happens to her. Well, she does insofar as it affects Mae, but she’s made her peace with it by now. She was ready back in January. She was very much prepared to go then. She wasn’t happy about it, of course, she was so angry she could have spat, and planned to do just that, before he turned it on its head. 

It’s typical of Tom, after all, to somehow turn even her expectation that he was about to kill her into some kind of sick, deranged, narcissistic, masturbatory exercise in ‘testing his self control’. Trying to worm his way back under her skin, hoping she was still young and stupid and weak enough to immediately swoon into his arms when he responded not with violence but with tenderness. She’s sure he plotted that out weeks ahead of time, eagerly anticipating some sort of shameful, teary confession on her part- I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t hurt me, I love you-

Fuck him. Did he think she was going to beg? For Mae, maybe. Yes, she would. Of course she would. That’s her child. She would do anything for Mae. But for herself? For him? She all but begged him not to go down the path he chose in the first place. She all but begged him not to open the Chamber, all but begged him not to make her choose, all but begged him not to hurt Matthew. Where did that get her? When has living on his capricious concept of empathy ever done a damn thing for her? Isn’t that part of why she left in the first place? So she wouldn’t spend the next decade alternatively cajoling, begging, and threatening him not to do any more horrible things? Congratulating him on the odd occasion when he decided to do something decent? An entire life, whittled down to approving or disapproving of his every word and action. 

What a miserable fucking excuse for an existence. Giving him the Amy Benson seal of approval at every turn. Pretending like it wasn’t eating away at her from the inside out. And he wouldn’t even have noticed. Or cared, so long as she was there, entertaining his delusions of grandeur and his schemes for the future. Knowing she was complicit, an accomplice, even, in Merlin knows how many terrible things. And even the idea of raising a child in those circumstances- In a sense, she’s very glad he thinks she’d never willingly have any child of his. He should feel that way. That’s correct. She would never, ever bring a child into that sort of life, into that house, that shoddy excuse for a family. She’d rather live homeless on the streets with a child than ever expose them to that kind of deep-seated rot and corruption. In every sense but biological and genetic, Mae is not his child, has never been his child. 

He has had no bearing on her childhood. He has had no say on what she does or where she goes or what she likes. He never will. He will never control Mae, never hoard her like a possession to be placed on a high shelf, another perverse trophy or tool. He will never make her feel small and helpless and like a passive spectator to her own life. That, as far as Amy is concerned, is a triumph. The only downside to it is… this. Mae can never be around him like that again. Amy doesn’t even want her in the same city block as him. Whether he realized she was there or not, it’s a miracle Mae came out of this unscathed aside from some tears and embarrassment. He could have hurt Mae. He could have killed Mae, and that would be it, and Amy’s last memory of her would be her small face pressed up against the window of the Knight Bus, breath fogging the glass. 

Some terrible, primal part of her is preparing for it. Amy knows this, and the intrusive fear is inevitable, and there is nothing she can do to prevent those dark thoughts from scurrying back and forth like rats in one corner of her mind. Some savage part of her knows that if that ever were to happen, there would be no point in living anymore, and nothing to stop her from making him feel every bit of her pain before she followed Mae out of this world and into another one. Some part of her is still considering it- how would she kill him? What would she use? Something slow-acting. She’d want him to know it was her, want him to see her before he died. There are poisons that can make you feel as though you’re burning from the inside out. There are tinctures that make the Cruciatus Curse look like child’s play, a bit of light roughhousing. That’s what she would use. And she’d tell him the truth before he went deaf from the pain of it, so he’d know exactly how he’d ruined both of them. 

Mae turns a page, unwilling to acknowledge her presence. Amy sits down on the edge of the bed anyways. “I know you’re upset,” she says slowly, “but I need you to tell me one more time what happened, Mae.”

She has to be sure. It’s a coincidence. It has to be a coincidence. How could Mae have known? She couldn’t have. She’s a little girl, with friends and schoolwork and a life of her own. She doesn’t have any worries or cares. She’s a normal, happy, child, not like Amy. She’s not broken in the same ways Amy was as a girl. She’s not damaged, not unlovable. The only person who ever loved Amy as a child was the same person who’s threatened Mae’s life. What does that say about her? 

Mae loves her, but Amy made Mae. Her friends care for her, of course, they do love her in their way, but it’s not quite the same. What does that say about her? Tom was the first who ever loved her, and she let him love her, and he could ruin her life at any given moment with a snap of his fingers. There is so much wrong with him, but there is something wrong with her too. She has cracks in her that she let him slip in and fill, instead of mending them herself, instead of being strong enough to be alone. She’s tried very hard to do mostly good things with her life, but some part of Amy is still very much convinced that she is not a good person. 

“Marian invited me over,” Mae recounts stonily. “She wrote me the other day about the wedding, ‘cause she forgot her mum had to go for it to work, and asked if I wanted to come along. I said yes, so I took my dress and went. What’s the big deal? I’m not allowed out in public without you, now.”

“Mae,” Amy says, struggling to keep her tone even. “Tagging along to- to a friend of a friend’s party is one thing. Attending a wedding- the Minister’s wedding- Marian’s mother shouldn’t have even offered to bring you along. That’s completely- you shouldn’t have been there. It’s not somewhere they want random children running about-,”

“I’m not ‘random children’!” Mae snaps, closing her book. “I’m not even a child anymore!”

Amy has to bite back a laugh at that. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you’re a child. You are twelve years old. Just because you’ve started menstruating-,”

“Don’t say that word,” Mae growls, burying her face in her pillow. “It sounds disgusting.”

“It’s the medical term,” Amy isn’t going to let her derail this into a debate over phrasing. “Mae, look at me. I’m not upset with you.”

“You sound upset,” she snipes, her voice muffled.

“I just- I wish you’d told me beforehand. I- You can’t just make these kind of decisions for yourself just yet, you don’t have the experience-,”

“I need ‘experience’ to go to a wedding, now?” Mae raises her head, face flushed. “Do you even hear yourself? You sound insane,” she snaps, and for an instant sounds a good deal older than twelve. It makes Amy nervous. “I’m being ridiculous? You’re acting like you found me in some opium den or underground club or something! I went to a wedding! Just because you hate Gaunt and everyone to do with the Ministry-,”

“Where did you hear that?” Amy demands.

“I made an educated guess!” Mae barks back. “It’s not very difficult, Mum, you should try it some time-,”

“Don’t speak to me like that,” Amy resists the urge to massage her temple, which is beginning to pound behind her eyes. “I- Mae, don’t lie to me. Please don’t lie to me. Did you really go to this wedding just because Marian brought it up and you thought it’d be fun?”

Mae sits all the way up in bed, stares at her for a moment, blue eyes hard as stone. “Yes.”

Amy exhales quickly, fighting the wings beating in her chest. “Alright.” Mae is still staring at her, inscrutable. Amy resists the urge to pull her into her arms, as if she could embrace her into a small child again. She swallows. “Mae, I have to tell you something.”

Mae stiffens slightly, pulling one of her pillows into her lap, tucking her chin against it. “What?”

“I- I wasn’t being honest with you, when I mentioned the Minister, before. How I didn’t really know him in school.” Amy closes her eyes for a moment, steeling herself, the continues. “That’s not true. I did know him in school, I- I knew him before school, too.”

Mae bites her lower lip, studying her. “He was at Wool’s with you?”

“Yes,” says Amy. “We- we grew up there together. He was my… he was my friend.” It feels oddly metallic in her mouth, like blood. “He was my only friend, for a long time. We… we were the only ones there who could… could do magic, so it just… made sense for us to stick together.”

“What was he like?” Mae asks. “When he was little, I mean.”

Amy feels as though she’s standing on a shaking, sinking ice floe. “He was very, very smart,” she says. “Really… really clever. No matter what, he always knew the answers in school. The teachers hated him. And he was… he could be very… nice.”

Mae wrinkles her nose. “Nice?”

“He was nice to talk to,” Amy amends. “He was… charismatic, in his way, even then. Although no one really… the other children would pick on him, sometimes, pick on both of us, because they knew we were different, but mostly they avoided him. He liked to be alone.”

“But not with you,” Mae says.

“We were friends.” It still feels so absurd to say it aloud. “We were… we kept each other company. It’s hard to explain. And then we got to go to Hogwarts, and it was so exciting, but we just… we grew apart, Mae. That was normal. I- we weren’t going to stay the same for the rest of our lives. I was in Hufflepuff, and I had my friends, and he was in Slytherin, and he had his. Friends who… didn’t want anything to do with me, or me with them.”

“So you stopped being friends?” Mae demands. “I have friends in other houses.”

Amy blinks. “Like who?”

“Ambrose Bulstrode,” Mae says.

“The boy you got in a fight with?”

“We don’t fight anymore,” Mae mutters sullenly. 

Amy ignores the tension in the back of her neck. Of course there’s nothing wrong with Mae having friends in Slytherin, but did it have to be a Bulstrode, one of the Sacred Twenty Eight? She tries to set it aside for now. That’s the least of her concerns with Mae at the moment.

“Well… I had friends in other houses too, just… he became a different person, Mae. We didn’t agree on the same things anymore. He… he hated muggles.”

“But weren’t his parents muggles, if he was at Wool’s?” Mae questions sharply.

Amy shakes her head. “His father was. His mother was a witch.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died.” 

Mae is very quiet after that. 

“We grew apart,” Amy says. “You know? It just happened. And he got… very involved with people who… who weren’t good people. Who thought muggles were inferior, and muggleborns. Who only cared about blood purity, and money, and… and tradition. Not all traditions are good ones, Mae. So by the time we were… older, I didn’t really want anything to do with him. And then I found out he did some very bad things, and I… I really, really didn’t want anything to do with him then.”

“What did he do?” Mae whispers.

Amy hesitates, then settles on, “He lied. He stole things. He… he hurt people who were in his way. And he… he killed.”

Her daughter’s eyes are as wide as saucers. “Who did he kill? Did you see it? Were you there? Was it a muggle? Was it a duel?”

“No,” says Amy. “It… I found out afterwards. They were muggles. He killed them because… because they made him angry.”

“Were they good people?” Mae’s question catches her off-guard.

Amy frowns. “They were… they were people. I don’t think they were very good, but they weren’t- they didn’t deserve to die, and even if they had, it wasn’t- it’s not anyone’s place to do things like that. To be judge and jury and executioner. He wasn’t defending himself, or anyone else. It’s wrong to kill someone just because they make you angry, or you think they deserve it. That’s not how the world works. Not how it should work, anyways.”

Mae lets the pillow flop back onto the bed. “Did he find out you knew?”

“Yes,” says Amy. “I told him so.”

Mae’s brow furrows. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I was angry,” says Amy. “Because I wanted to make him afraid. I wanted him to leave me alone for good. I didn’t want to be his friend anymore. I didn’t want to be around him anymore.”

“Does he hate you, now?” Mae asks suddenly. “Is that why you left England?”

“I left because- because I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to see more of the world than just… what I knew. I didn’t just leave because of him,” Amy says firmly. “But I don’t regret leaving. I would do it again.” 

“So why did we come back here?” Mae presses intently. “If he’s the Minister now and he hates you and probably me too, right?”

“We came back here because I wanted- I wanted you to be able to go to Hogwarts,” Amy says, “and experience what I experienced, and… because it’s not good to live in fear. Alright? That doesn’t mean you should be reckless, but it’s not good to spend your whole life afraid. And I… I wanted to make sure that if he… if he did anything bad again, I would be here to help stop him.”

“How?” Mae scrunches up her nose. “You’re not even an Auror. Or a duelist. Or anything like that.”

“I’m not sure,” that, at least, is entirely honest on Amy’s part. “I’ll… think of something. But you needed to know, alright? He is a very dangerous man, Mae. You cannot- I don’t ever want you around him, you don’t know… I don’t know what he might do if he saw you by yourself somewhere and realized you were my daughter.”

“I didn’t do anything to him,” Mae sounds almost offended. “He’s a prick if he goes around hurting people just because their mum made him mad.”

“I know,” Amy kisses her flushed forehead. “I know. Of course it’s not your fault, but it’s just- I don’t want anything to happen to you, alright? I don’t even want to think about it. You are the most important thing to me, Mae. Do you know? I love you so much, and I just- I was really frightened when I realized you’d been near him.” 

She studies her daughter’s face; it seems like Mae believes her. Good. She doesn’t need to- she’s told her enough. She doesn’t need to know the rest just yet, it’s not- it would only upset her. She’s too young. She wouldn’t understand. She doesn’t need to know the extent of Amy’s mistakes. When she’s a little older, Amy tells herself. Then she’ll tell her the full truth. But not yet. For tonight, this was enough. She knows that Tom is dangerous and that she needs to stay away from him and anyone associated with him.

“I have to tell you something too,” Mae says in a small voice. 

Amy feels a stab of fear in her stomach. “What?” she asks. “You can tell me, Mae. I promise I won’t be angry with you if something happened at the wedding.”

There’s a long silence. Then Mae says, “When I… got my…,” she makes a hand motion, “um… I had to use the bathroom really bad, so… I went inside the house. And I heard these men talking.” 

Amy tenses all the more, if that’s even possible. “Talking about what? Did they see you?” 

“No,” says Mae, quickly. “They never saw me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Mae snaps. “They were talking about… the Knights of Walpurgis. And how… the Minister- Gaunt- he’s… in it? And… I guess he tells people in it what to do, and… and some other people are in it too.”

“What people?” Amy’s heart is in her throat.

“Professor Carmody and her husband,” Mae says very quickly. 

Amy feels as though she’d just been doused with a bucket of icy water. She leans back slightly. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Carmody’s husband was there, talking to someone.”

“To who?” 

Mae hesitates. “I don’t know. Some man. I didn’t see their faces. But I know it was Mr. Norbrook. He was talking about his wife.”

“Maybe you misunderstood,” Amy says. “I don’t…” She thinks back to the very first feast, June’s cool assessment of muggle and magical relations. We all know my opinions on them being surrounded by muggles in the first place. No, she can believe it. Arthur’s slightly awkward friendliness. They live barely two streets away. Are they home right now? She has the urge to jump up and close the curtains, but she restrains herself. “I believe you, Mae. Thank you for telling me. I know that must have been scary to listen to.”

“What are you going to do?” Mae asks, mouth a thin line of scrutiny.

I don’t know. “I’ll speak to Dumbledore about it.”

“Why not Dippet? He’s the Headmaster.”

“I trust Dumbledore to take it seriously.” She forces a wan smile onto her face. “Look, everything is going to be fine, alright? Just try to act normally in her class from now on. And… please don’t wander around Hogsmeade alone, Mae. Or talk to strangers if I’m not with you.”

“Carmody and Norbrook aren’t strangers.”

“They are if we don’t really know them,” Amy says firmly. She checks her watch. “It’s getting late. Do you want something to eat before you go to bed?”

Mae seems about to argue further with her, then lies back down. “Hot chocolate.” Rain is pattering against the windows; the predicted showers have arrived. 

Amy almost says that hot chocolate does not count as a meal, but just nods and stands up, smoothing down the bed covers. She walks slowly downstairs. The cottage seems small and shabby, like a house made of twigs and pebbles, a child’s hide-away, in the dark. She goes into the kitchen and stares into the small garden. Something moves out of the corner of her eye, in the sitting room, and she whirls, pulling her wand. Salome the cat slinks by, meowing in annoyance, looking for a midnight snack himself. Amy lowers her shaking wand, and leans against the kitchen counter. She’ll redo all the wards first thing in the morning. And write to Dumbledore. This is getting completely out of hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. First split POV chapter of the fic! Exciting! I did debate leaving it as just Tom, but I didn't want to delay the Mae and Amy conversation to the next chapter, either, now that the plot is in full swing. It's hard to believe we're at twenty chapters already! Grass Crown is quickly outpacing Barbed Wire in terms of length and just the sheer number of characters and subplots going on.
> 
> 2\. Tom is very eager to finally cut Lydia loose from her family, moreso because now she's under his thumb, and not their's, than out of any concern for her emotional well-being. We also see him initially brush off the chance encounter with Mae, although he didn't see her and only learns after the fact that it may have been her at all. Whoops. He does identify the same thing Amy does, finding it difficult to believe that Amy would willingly let Mae be in a situation where she might run into him, so I think he's genuinely a bit confused about all of this. Obviously both of them severely underestimate Mae's ability to direct her own actions and scheme.
> 
> 3\. Oddly or not, Tom manages to seemingly go the entire wedding without thinking of Amy, right up until they cut the cake. I think he tends to associate Amy with more 'practical' things, such as food, than with more immaterial things, like wedding vows. We also see... some faltering attempt at understanding her reasons for 'abandoning' him. Tom takes two steps forward, one step back, as usual. He reasons that he was too impulsive and caught up in the present to properly plan for the future, and that he should have taken her more into his confidence in order to convince her to stay with him, rather than just 'assuming' she would never leave him. 
> 
> 4\. While Lydia had believed Tom had no idea about her metamorphmagus abilities, we see that (unsurprisingly, maybe) he'd known all along, and it had been one of her 'selling points' when he was discussing the marriage with her family. Lydia has never shown anyone outside her immediate family her 'true face' and is completely taken aback and unsettled when Tom reveals that he knows and demands to see it. One of the aspects of her appearance Lydia had been hiding are some pretty extensive burn scars, which she is no mood to discuss with Tom. She also seems genuinely shocked and hurt that her family would have manipulated her into believing that Tom was unaware of her abilities, when in reality that's a major part of why he wanted to marry her. 
> 
> 5\. Lest he feel too smug for too long, Tom promptly gets a smack in the face when he finally has the chance to examine the ring in complete privacy... and realizes that it's a forgery and not the real deal. I felt it would be unrealistic for Tom to have the wool pulled over his eyes about this for too long, but he is definitely shocked at Amy's gall in pulling something like this once again with him. Granted, Amy thought she'd be dead regardless as soon as she handed over the ring, but... 
> 
> 6\. Jumping to Amy, we see a fateful conversation between her and Mae... in which neither tells the other the full truth. Mae doesn't tell Amy about her 'investigations' and instead portrays it as mere coincidence that she wound up at the wedding. She does tell Amy about the conversation between Norbrook and Applewhite, but doesn't admit that it was Applewhite, her 'friend's father, who Norbrook was speaking with. By the same token, Amy tells Mae a very watered down, brief version of her history with Tom... but doesn't tell her about the ring, their true feelings for each other, or, of course, that Tom happens to be her father. 
> 
> 7\. As frustrating as this is, I think one of the major themes of this story is secrets and the consequences of keeping them, and at this point both Mae and Amy are, for various reasons, 'in too deep' and beginning to hide more and more from each other. Out of protectiveness, fear, denial, resentment, mistrust, etc. Amy *should* have told Mae the full truth- she had the perfect opportunity to do so. Instead she decides not to, claiming Mae is still too young to understand- but really it's her own fear of what her daughter might really think of her. Mae should have been honest too, but fears how Amy would have reacted. Their mutual secret keeping is putting both of them in danger.
> 
> 8\. You can find me on my blog at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/), where I discuss this fic and others.


	21. Matthew I

ST. ALBANS, APRIL 1958 

Something is crackling and popping in the next room. It takes Matthew a good few moments to realize that it’s bacon, not the beginnings of a house fire. He rouses himself with a groan, massaging his stiff neck and pulling at his rumpled tie. He’d come home at some ungodly hour last night, only sat down to take off his shoes and look over the paper… and promptly passed out without ever making it up to bed. Evie must have come down at some point and taken his auror’s robes and shoes, but other than that, he’s still in his work clothes, and it’s going to take more than one ironing to straighten out this shirt. 

Blearily, he stands up, squinting into the bright spring sunshine spilling through windows looking out onto the garden, now flush and green with new life. Evie’s been in a good mood lately; spring is always a happy time for herbologists, and he knows she’s got multiple specimens she’s been anxiously waiting to cultivate. There’s only so much space in the greenhouse, after all, and they haven’t exactly got the money or government permits for an arboretum or laboratory, unless you count the cellar where she keeps dried herbs. 

He can hear Beth chattering away in the kitchen; Matthew smiles in spite of the pain in his neck and stiffness in his legs, and goes in to say goodmorning to his wife and child. “Well, well, well,” Evelyn drawls, without turning around from the frying bacon in the levitating pan before her. “Look who’s decided to rouse himself, Elizabeth.”

“Baby Beth!” Matthew cheers at his daughter, who turned two last month. Beth is a literally bouncing baby girl, fidgeting happily in her rickety wooden high chair engraved with dancing elephants and tigers. He plucks her out of her seat and sets her on his hip; she pats affectionately at a stain on his shirt, then yanks on his tie. “Dada, UP,” she commands, and Matthew goodnaturedly lets her clamber up onto his shoulders, her small hands rooted in his auburn hair. He holds her there with one hand, mercilessly tickles her ribs with the other, provoking squeals of laughter and delighted rabbit kicks to his chest. 

Evelyn huffs, finally turning around, crossing her arms over her floral dressing gown. “Honestly, Elizabeth, you are not being a very fair and impartial judge here. How are you supposed to become Minister for Magic at this rate, hmm?” She leans forward and squeezes one of Beth’s flailing, bare feet, then pecks Matthew on the cheek. “You smell awful. Go shower, or no breakfast for you.”

“Feed me, and I’ll find the motivation,” he offers.

“Bathe, and I’ll let you sit at my kitchen table.”

“Your kitchen table?” he scoffs.

“My brother built it, Matthew!”

“Under my supervision, sure-,”

Evie leans over and turns up the radio, drowning out his protests. It’s tuned into a muggle station; she was raised by a muggle father and a magical mother, and holds fast that muggle music, art, and fashion is inherently superior, no exceptions, bar none. Matthew gave up arguing with her about around their second date, even if he thinks some of these songs are no less ludicrous than what’s on Wizarding Waves or Magic Medlies. 

“I’ve changed my mind/This love is fine/Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!” she mumbles along under her breath as he reluctantly settles Beth- not Elizabeth, Elizabeth sounds dowdy and old-fashioned, whereas Beth is just right, just like everything about his daughter, from her carroty curls to her freckled cheeks to her button nose- back into her high chair. 

“Don’t burn my bacon?” It comes across more a suggestion than an order at the look Evelyn gives him over her shoulder. Matthew’s very familiar with the ‘henpecked husband’ jokes; he’s been hearing them since they were engaged, even from her own brothers. He’s never much minded. Evie’s a Gryffindor through and through- stubborn, confident, and utterly uninterested in anyone’s opinion on how she ought to conduct herself. People are baffled when he tells them she’s a herbologist, as if they expected some mousy little woman puttering away with some potted plants and making floral arrangements. 

He doesn’t think Evelyn’s ever ‘puttered’ in her life. This is the same woman who plays rousing classical music to her plants and procures fresh meat from the market every Sunday for the more… carnivorous ones. He’s still not comfortable turning his back on that Tentacula. He swears it’s got a plan to put him on the menu, one way or another. Evie just laughs whenever he mentions it, and tells him he’s arrogant to even assume the Tentacula cares for him one way or another. 

He showers and changes quickly, in and out, and hurries back downstairs just in time to swipe the slice of bacon with the most fat on it from the plate Evelyn is setting down on the table. 

“Disgusting,” she scoffs. “I can’t believe you like that stuff.”

He’s too preoccupied chewing to respond beyond a defensive grunt. She selects the most blackened piece, and crunches on it thoughtfully while pouring some dry cereal out for Beth, ignoring her attempts to snatch the bacon from her. Evelyn smiles and does a brief shimmy in her slippers as the song ends, then sighs and switches off the radio when it transitions into a traffic report. “I’ll give Wizarding Waves this,” she mutters. “No bloody roadwork updates.”

“Our roads do tend to work,” he says, as he selects another slice of bacon. “Do we have any eggs left?”

She mimes cracking one onto his skull, then levitates an egg out of the carton on the end of the narrow countertop and into a skillet. “I should be making you cook your own breakfast, the way you carried on last night. Second time you haven’t even made it up the stairs in two months. I’d half a mind to wake you with a cold cup of water when I came down this morning.”

Matthew grimaces; he doesn’t like the brutal new hours anymore than she does. “I know. But they’re pushing everyone later and later, you know, Pike’s concerned Gaunt might open an inquiry into the Department, and it’s just… Well, we always face the heat first, don’t we?”

“I don’t know,” she says, “can’t say I blame him about this inquiry, when they still haven’t caught that bastard butchering muggle girls, or that wolf pack up north-,”

Matthew shoots an anxious look at Beth; he knows she can’t really understand, but he doesn’t like discussing these sort of things in front of her at all. Children should be innocent. That’s why he does his job, right? To protect the innocent. To keep people safe. “That’s not what it’s really over,” he says, lowering his voice as if that will mask it from Beth, who is sticking a piece of cereal to her chin. “He’s unleashed fire and fury over Isola not being found.”

Evelyn nods. “That’s the one who-,”

“Cyril Taylor, yes.” He doesn’t like saying ‘killed’ or ‘murdered’ in front of Beth, either. She’ll have to deal with enough, with an auror for a father, without him adding all sorts of violent things to her vocabulary early on.

“That,” Evelyn says, as his egg begins to sizzle, “is why I want you to request a transfer. Witch Watchers. Improper Use of Magic. Counterfeit Spells. I don’t care. Anything that takes you out of the field and into a nice, safe-,”

“Dull,” he says under his breath.

“Charming-,”

“Depressing-,”

“Office,” she settles with an aggressive smile, all teeth. “Come on. You’ve had your fun, Matty. Seven years in the field! Righting wrongs, catching criminals, rushing into burning buildings-,”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“The glory days have to come to an end sometime,” she reasons, blinking as the kettle begins to shriek. “Tea?”

“Please.” He chews his lower lip, unwilling to let her lead him into a proper argument this early on a Saturday morning, equally unwilling to just smile and dismiss her. “I’ve got plenty of good years left in me. Besides, this is- I mean, you can’t expect me to up and leave the Auror’s Office, people work their entire lives to make rank, it’s an honor-,”

“Is it an honor?” she questions, pouring his tea. “Serving Minister Gaunt? Remind me again of the great honor you feel, working under a man who you said, and I quote, ‘is five years away from having us all marching in jackbooted lockstep’.”

“I was a little drunk,” he relents.

“Well, Joan though it was hilarious.”

“You can’t deny he’s not corrupt,” Matthew argues, as she hands him his cup. “Thank you. Come on, Ev. You were Head Girl with him. You know as well as I do what he’s really like. Behind the…”

“Striking good looks? Made for radio voice? Surprisingly good taste in clothing?” She laughs at the look on his face. “Switch off the puppy eyes. You think I don’t know he was a little bastard in school, who’s grown into a big bastard who likes throwing his weight around? But honestly. You give him more credit than he’s due. We have checks and balances for a reason. He’s not about to steamroll over the Wizengamot-,”

“No, he’ll have them lay out the velvet rugs for him, first-,”

“And have us all in some crackpot dictatorship by June,” she sighs. “Yes. We’ve been over this. If the change in management disgusts you so much… get out of the firing squad and into a nice, lovely, peaceful-,”

“Soul-crushing-,”

“Office cubicle!” she cheers, prompting Beth to throw up her sticky hands and cheer as well. “Yes, Elizabeth! Yes to Daddy working a regular 9 to 5, so Mummy doesn’t have to peel him off the sofa and tell him to shower!”

He sips at his tea so as to avoid responding to that. Matthew likes his job. He’s good at his job. People seem to tell him so, at any rate. Joan had been through three defunct auror trainees before him. He made it through the crucible, sanity and spine intact on the other side, and they work well together. He thinks the work they do is important. Stopping bad people from doing bad things, from abusing magic in a multitude of ways to scam the system, create chaos, hurt the less powerful. But that doesn’t mean he agrees with every single order he’s given. He trusts Pike as Head Auror, but Pike’s working within a system that often needs to get his priorities straight.

The Isola case, for one. Yes, what happened with Taylor was a nasty shock and a tragedy. Matthew was at the funeral. Those poor kids, the wife… He never wants to imagine Evie and Beth in that situation. But you can’t deny that the entire thing was escalated beyond reason. Isola was brought on on nonviolent charges. Unregistered portkey. Whatever he did before that in Spain, not exactly relevant at the moment. 

He still thinks Gaunt did something during that interview. Frightened him. Got… under his skin, somehow, enough to make him fear for his life and break out before his bail was even set. Then an entire team of hit wizards, mobilized to hunt him down? Absurd. They could have bid their time and waited for him to be caught at yet another routine checkpoint. The paperwork is what does most of these blokes in. Instead it turned into a manhunt- you know who could use a manhunt, he thinks, Virgil Mulciber. They all know the man’s a serial murderer, but everyone’s still tiptoeing around, delaying the warrants, ‘misplacing’ paperwork- a thousand inefficiencies and ‘innocent mix-ups’, all conspiring to keep him from seeing trial. Vanished witnesses. Tampered evidence. Basic interrogation procedures flouted. 

Instead the Department goes all in on Isola for vague reasons… and surprise, surprise, a hit wizard winds up dead. Matthew doesn’t disbelieve Isola killed him. But the scene didn’t quite point to ‘cold-blooded murder’. There was obviously a duel. Is there honor among thieves? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean he’s the same sort of evil as someone like Mulciber… or Gaunt. 

He eats his egg while Evelyn outlines their plans for the day to Beth, who listens attentively. Matthew’s just glad for the free weekend, for once. He doesn’t like being away from them for days on end, popping in and out in early mornings and late nights. They’re fortunate Evie works from home and doesn’t have to keep any particular hours herself. He’d hate to have to leave Beth with someone else. Especially if they want to give her a little brother or sister. Matthew has one of each, and he’d like the same for his daughter. Besides, the house has three bedrooms. Whether it’s two sisters and a brother, or two brothers and a sister, they can share. 

“And then,” Evie’s saying, “after our walk, you, me, and Daddy are going to go to the farmer’s market! And we are going to the park, to look at the stream, and see if there are any frog-,”

There’s an abrupt rapping on the kitchen window, and Evelyn stops talking abruptly and looks around as Matthew glances up from his sip of tea. Joan is gesturing towards the doors leading out onto the terrace, clutching a thermos in one hand, some sort of scone in the other. His heart sinks slightly, even as Evelyn jumps up to open the door for her. Joan and him are friends- it’d be awkward if they weren’t, given how much time they spend around each other- but she’s not the sort to randomly show up just for a nice chat over some eggs and bacon. 

Evie lets her in, already talking a mile a minute. “Finally decided to take us up on that brunch offer, eh? What, tired of eating watery gruel for breakfast, Jo? Come sit down! You want toast? We can do toast- or bacon, if Matthew hasn’t eaten it all while my back is turned-,”

Joan is five years older than both of them, tall, heart-shaped face and criminally good teeth, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, and refuses, point blank, to reveal what house she was in at Hogwarts. “Not really relevant, is it?” is Joan’s favorite phrase, just as blue is her favorite color. Matthew’s pretty certain she was a Ravenclaw, although he never knew her while in school and doesn’t have the time to go rooting around for old records. Joan kisses Evelyn on the cheek, informs him he has bacon grease on his chin, and sits down at their table next to Beth, who she tickles under her chin. 

Joan removes her jaunty, ribboned robin’s egg blue cloche hat, setting it down in her lap, to reveal the low bun at the back of her scalp, stuck through with a gleaming aquamarine hair pin. Matthew used to make the odd snide comment about the hair pin, mostly when Joan would fidget with it in a passing mirror, but shut up about that when he watched her drive it through someone’s hand once, pinning it to an end table in the middle of a duel in a tattered hotel room. She refuses Evie’s offer to take her blue-grey fleece coat, either, just confirming his suspicions that this isn’t a social call, although she does take off her light spring gloves. 

Evelyn is looking between the two of them curiously now. 

Joan clears her throat after taking another quick bite of her scone. It smells like apple. “I really am sorry to do this,” she says apologetically, “but I’ve just got summons from Pike himself.” She smiles wryly at Matthew. “We’ve been specially requested by Applewhite. Bilbao, tonight. They’ve found where Isola’s in hiding.”

“The Spanish Ministry is letting us extract him?”

“Permission was fast-tracked after Gaunt offered to release a few prisoners from Azkaban. You know. Former associates of Grindelwald.”

“Naturally,” Matthew says under his breath, then scowls. “I don’t buy that Applewhite really wants me tagging along. You know how protective he is of his unit.” 

“Maybe he feels like doing you a favor. The case was ours before it got pushed into their laps. Maybe he just wants to show off, rub it in our faces,” she shrugs. 

“You’re going with him, though?” Evelyn presses, her tone suddenly tense and low.

Joan smiles warmly. “A Spanish night in April? Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Besides, it will keep me from nagging Rena over the Floo.”

Matthew doesn’t know how or where Joan met Renata Ferrante, only that Joan promises it’s a good story that she’ll tell him someday if they’re ever stuck in a lift or in another never ending hallway. Renata’s been on an immigration black list for years now, flagged because of her work with the Italian Resistance during the war. Most people would call it heroism, but the Ministry calls it ‘negligent exposure of magic to muggles’ and ‘flouting of the Statute’. Apparently Gaunt got Renata’s case and several others pushed through, and now she’ll be in the country by the end of May. Joan’s delighted; Matthew wants to be happy for her sake, but he doesn’t like the feeling of Tom having anything to do with it. Taints it, somehow. 

Joan makes herself scarce after their breakfast concludes, a good deal more subdued than it began. He suspects she doesn’t want to be witness to the ensuing row, and for good reason; Matthew’s never met anyone who liked to argue nearly as much as Evie. To his surprise, she goes quiet and cool instead, floating dishes into the sink with his assistance, sweeping crumbs off the floor. Matthew takes Beth out of her chair and holds her close, as if to reassure himself. Evelyn looks at them for a long moment, father and daughter, and says only, “We might as well go out for our walk, then.”

“One night,” he says, “maybe two. Probably just the one, Ev. I could be back by this time tomorrow. You won’t even miss me.” He tries to smile but it feels stiff, forced. “I know this isn’t what much notice, but once it’s done with-,”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” she says, shortly, but she doesn’t want to talk about it later, either, and when he’s getting ready to leave at four, she just watches him from the sitting room, where Beth is engrossed in her dollhouse. She hugs him very tightly, as if trying to break a rib in revenge for him leaving during the one weekend they thought they’d have all to themselves. Matthew kisses the top of her head, tries to keep his body language light, free of worries. He’s gone on far more dangerous missions before. He ignores the fact that part of him is hoping Isola slips out of reach at the last minute, rendering the entire thing a bust. Applewhite has a tendency to get overzealous about these sort of things. He doesn’t want a 24 page long report to type up next week. 

He’s never liked to make a big fuss of it, him leaving. Always worried it might jinx it, this time around. Best to just treat it like any other demanding job. 

And if it’s any other demanding job, then he can pretend Applewhite is just another obnoxious office stiff. He’s alarmingly difficult to dislike, though, genial and quick-witted, absurdly intent on maintaining eye contact at all times. And it is difficult to disparage someone who could have dodged the draft but who instead turned in his wand and shipped out to Dunkirk. Michael is tall, broad-shouldered, truly honeyed blonde in the way few adult men are, with nearly cherubic waves and a toothy grin to match. In sort, he looks straight out an advert for cologne or men’s watches, cleft jaw, Roman nose and all. Compared to the rest of the more or less nondescript huddle of hit wizards, he stands out, not just because of his occasionally booming voice. 

“Harker, Abbott,” he says pleasantly; they saved the introductions until everyone had taken the correct portkey. As it stands, they are a tired, rumpled clump standing on a muddy hillside overlooking the city; it’s a warm, rainy spring night in northern Spain, and Bilbao sprawls out before them, framed by lush green mountains, bordering by what is currently one of many teeming slums; buildings built on the outskirts of the rapidly industrializing sprawl to house thousands upon thousands of migrant workers, most here for the iron industry boom. 

Applewhite, for all that he can be quite talkative in the office, keeps it brief here; he rattles off the names of his unit- Richardson, Lewis, Everett, Darke, Murdoch, all men save for Everett- and identifies to them all exactly which building is the target. “Isola is holed up with some old friends from his Resistance days,” he says. “Older married couple.” Matthew doesn’t catch their names- did Applewhite even mention them? “The flat is on the fourth floor,” he says, “#43. He’s been in and out of there for the past few days, Spanish authorities none the wiser. Last time he left the building was around noon; he came back an hour later, no movement since. I did a walk-about of the place with Murdoch-,”

“You’re certain you weren’t recognized?” Joan presses suddenly, brow furrowed.

Applewhite’s smile lingers between reassuring and patronizing. Murdoch holds up two small vials between his stubby fingers. “Very certain.” 

Polyjuice, Matthew thinks, or some other glamor potion. Still, it’s a risk. They can’t be positive Isola hasn’t been tipped off. Then again, the longer they spend out here debating it, despite the cover of darkness, the more risk there is of him making another run for it. “You know the floor plan?” he questions, brusquely. His mood’s taken a turn since this afternoon. Maybe it’s delayed guilt over leaving Evie and Beth like that. He just wants this over with. 

“By heart,” Applewhite says. “All entrances and exits. We get in, we get out. There’s no wards up, we can easily apparate back out here once Isola’s been subdued.”

“And the people he’s been hiding with?” Joan prods.

Lewis laughs, exchanging a look with Darke. Applewhite shrugs. “So long as there’s no fuss, I see no reason why this can’t be a fairly painless endeavor. There’s eight of us to three of them.”

They make their way down from the mountainside, slipping and sliding in the long grass and mud until they find a dirt road. Matthew spends most of the long walk steeling himself. It’s been a few months since he was in a live duel, and he doesn’t know this place at all. He can’t afford to get complacent, confident he has the backup of the others, and make stupid mistakes. Best case scenario, Isola will be caught with his pants down, realize the jig is up, and come quietly. Michael doesn’t like the idea of innocent muggle neighbors getting caught in the crossfire. 

He knows he should be grateful. Applewhite didn’t have to include him on this. But he isn’t. He finds himself staring at the back of Applewhite’s head, watching rainwater trickle down his collar. Matthew doesn’t know all that much about him, aside from his recent friendliness with the Minister- although the same could be said for the entire Hit Wizard Office, in the wake of the Taylor tragedy- and that he has a couple of kids at Hogwarts. Foreign wife, too, Matthew’s heard, but he’s also heard that’s a very touchy subject with Applewhite, and a good way to get a few hexes thrown. 

The building itself is cheaply constructed and ramshackle; paper thin walls and narrow, cramped stairwells and hallways. Matthew looks round as they enter, taking notice of the children playing in the lobby under some fluorescent lights, despite the late hour, the boys smoking on the stairs, the distant crackle of music, a woman singing in Spanish, a fight raging on the floor above them, dishes shattering and doors slamming- There’s a dog barking in an alley outside, the clatter of footfall on the landing below, a child’s rubber ball goes bouncing past them as they reach the fourth floor, and he feels something oddly taut in him, watching a little boy and his sister go bounding after it, ignorant of the very dangerous people they’ve just darted past.

Applewhite stations Everett at one end of the long, narrow hall, Lewis at the other. Darke was left down in the lobby, Richardson and Murdoch are patrolling the street, and Joan and Matthew accompany Applewhite right up to the door. Matthew looks askance as they approach, careful to keep his voice down. “I thought hit wizards weren’t required to announce themselves.”

“Oh, we’re not,” Applewhite says far too casually, “but I think it’s only sporting.”

He raps firmly on the door, and then, when there’s no immediate response, pounds. Matthew exchanges a wary glance with Joan; is this normal? There’s the sound of someone moving around inside. Applewhite glances back at them sardonically, as if this is just another slow day at the office. Then he throws all his weight into the hinges, pulling his wand at the same time, and the door falls into the small flat with a loud bang. There’s a distant scream, and as they rush in, a cacophony of discordant noise and flashing multicolored lights. A middle aged woman struggles to pick herself up off the cluttered floor, a broken pot spilling out soil beside her, and a grey-haired man is crouched next to a table, shouting a curse in Spanish.

Joan deflects it with ease, then shouts out- Applewhite and another, smaller, wiry man wrestle across the floor as the lights flicker overhead, buzzing, and then there’s an godawful crack, like a branch splitting from a tree during a storm, and the smaller man- Isola, Matthew realizes, with longer hair and the beginnings of a beard- sinks through the floorboards, leaving Applewhite grasping at air and cursing. He jumps to his feet. “He won’t get far, he doesn’t know the city well enough to apparate at will, and the entrances and exits are blocked. Up or down?”

Matthew didn’t realize it was a question; he’s too busy dodging a hex from the woman, who is screaming her head off at him. Everett appears in the doorway, bloodied. “He came popped up on the stairs!” She’s swaying on her feet slightly, cradling a broken wand arm to her chest. “He threw me over the fucking rail!”

Joan stuns the man, then barks, “We don’t have permission to do a sweep of every single flat, it’s a muggle building! Let’s regroup outside-,”

“He’s still here,” Applewhite snarls. “Up or down?”

“Down,” Everett mumbles.

“Down it is,” Applewhite smiles, and jerks his head to the unconscious man, and the woman, who’s been disarmed and rendered helpless by a full-body lock; all she can twist angrily is her head. “Harker, Everett, keep watch in case he comes back up here. Abbott, with me- he’s your man, isn’t he?”

He stretches out his hand; Matthew takes it without thinking, and they apparate down, down, down-

They reappear outside a padlocked room in some dingy corner of the building. “Boiler room,” Applewhite explains. “He’ll try to break through a window, come out the back, and run for the hills, is my wager. Stand back.”

“I’ve got it,” Matthew snaps, and blasts the door off the hinges.

They hurry down into the dark, stumbling on the dusty wooden steps. “Lumos!” Matthew begins, but Applewhite clamps down on his wand, shaking his head, and flicks on the nearest light switch instead. The electric lights, hanging from the ceiling, sputter on ineffectively, one by one, casting grimy shadows across the large basement room. Matthew stares into the dark, searching for a face, a frame-

The full force of a spell hits him square in the side, sending him flying into the wall. Applewhite whirls around with a roar as Matthew struggles to catch his breath, certain he’s just cracked a rib, and painfully hauls himself to his feet. Isola stays low to the ground, more crouching than standing, really, and ducks behind piping and the odd pillar, dodging nearly every one of Applewhite’s crackling curses. He tosses something their way; a gas tank clatters across the filthy tiled floor, spilling out oily liquid, and Applewhite slips, swearing. 

“STUPEFY!” Matthew shouts, when he briefly sees Isola dart across the room. His curse bounces off a shield, which promptly dissolves. There’s the sound of glass shattering. Upstairs, people are shouting and running around in confusion; he can hear the pounding of feet.

“INCENDIO!” For an instant he thinks the spell came from Applewhite, but that makes no sense. The puddle of gasoline sparks up in flames; Matthew jumps back towards the stairs, can just distantly make out Isola dragging a bench over to one of the ground level windows, presumably so he can clamber up and out. 

“Aguamenti! Aguamenti maxima!” Matthew tries to combat the rapidly spreading flames ineffectively; when the water doesn’t do much, he casts a holding shield around them; it will only last for a little while. “We need to get upstairs, if one of the boilers explodes-,”

The spell catches him directly in the face; he crumples as if sucker punched, literally stunned, as Applewhite stands over him, straight-faced. Matthew’s eyelids flutter. Someone shouts. Then there’s another crack, and he’s gone. Matthew lies half-conscious on the floor, propped up against the wall, trying to will himself into a more conscious state. What just happened? Why would he- This isn’t how- His thoughts flutter frantically inside his mind, dying moths caught by the light. His holding shield over the burgeoning fire flickers, then dissolves with a series of bubbly pops. 

He can feel the heat baking into the flesh of his bare face from here. Smoke clogs the room, obscuring the flickering lights. Matthew sputters for breath- and something grabs him by the collar, tugs insistently, and then he’s out, feeling oddly light and buoyant, at least until a rush of cool air hits him. He comes to, shaking slightly, in a vacant lot, grasping for a wand that’s not there. Where is his wand? Did he drop it? Did it roll away? He rolls over onto the muddy earth, rain peppering across his hot back. 

A foot prods him, lightly. Someone coughs raggedly, clearing their throat. “Oye. Bishop. Friar. Priest. For the love of- you want to get a move on?” A less light prod, more of a gentle kick. Matthew manages to get onto his hand and knees, still sweating and struggling to catch his breath. “Don’t mess around with smoke inhalation,” someone advises him. “Take your time. You know, quickly. Maybe walk and breathe? Can we do that?”

Matthew scrambles to his feet, still reaching for his nonexistent wand, and backs up slowly, putting some space in between him and Jaime Isola. They’re not just outside the apartment block, they’re somewhere else, further up in the foothills. An abandoned mining camp, maybe? The rain has lessened significantly, and the wind picks up. Distantly, sirens are wailing, and he can see the dull glow of a fire in the distance. 

“Yeah,” says Isola. “I think it’s safe to say a boiler blew, huh? You know who lives in that building? Ordinary working people. Who came here to build something better than what they got. Even under these conditions. You think it was worth it?”

“You put them in danger,” Matthew finally has enough saliva to speak. “You chose to hide out here. You knew the risks of trying to masquerade among muggles. You’re not an innocent in this. And you started that fire.”

“Ah, the propaganda machine is alive and kicking in the back of your throat,” Isola drawls. “You so sure about that? You know your pal just left you to die? No, let’s not uh… Didn’t just leave you… sort of… engineered it so you would die? Pretty fucking convenient!” He whistles, and shakes out his hands as if trying to discard some excess energy. “You aurors, you got me all wound up! Fucking hell!” 

His hair is much longer than it was when Matthew last saw him in that interrogation room; it falls greasy black to his shoulders now, in unkempt waves, and his jaw is coated with stubble and a new mustache. His shirt is bloodstained and frayed, tucked haphazardly into his wet trousers, and there’s a new pair of sunglasses, crimson red, hanging from his collar. He shifts his wand from hand to hand. 

“Did you disarm me?” Matthew grits out.

“Nah,” says Isola. “I think your wand is kindling now. Very sad, I know. You look a little like you still want to hurt me, even though I just saved your life.”

“I-,” He feels vaguely sick. “Applewhite, he-,”

“Betrayed you?” Isola blows out a breath in faux-sympathy. “First time having someone fuck you over? I can see it in those puppy dog eyes. Yeesh. Don’t worry. It’ll settle.”

“That’s not- why would he do that?” Matthew is struggling to wrap his head around any of this. “He… if he didn’t want me along, why would he request that I- he wanted me here tonight-,”

“Now, I can’t speak for him,” Isolda holds up one hand defensively. “But maybe. Just maybe, someone wants you…” He trails off and drags a thumb across his throat. “You know. What’d you do? Start some internal inquiries? Piss off the wrong person? Because- I mean, what a way to go! Damn! They could have just dumped you in the river, but this, I mean- fire? That’s nasty. That’s personal.” His mouth twists into a crooked grin. “So. Personally speaking, Deacon, who wants you dead?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Planned to divide this chapter between Amy and Matthew, but it ended up working better as a standalone from his POV. It was interesting to write Matthew, and I initially never planned for him to get a direct POV, but there was no other way to show what happens in this chapter beyond someone else recounting the events, which would be boring. I know it was a crazy chapter, but hopefully not boring!
> 
> 2\. Matthew has gone on to live a pretty happy adult life, albeit with some increasing dissatisfaction with the priorities of the Auror Department and an obvious general grudge against Tom and his politics. He lives in St Albans, Hertfordshire, with his wife, Evelyn (who was actually Head Girl alongside Tom back in the day), a herbologist, and their young daughter, Elizabeth. Matthew likes to think of himself as an everyman but is from a fairly well known pureblood family and has largely benefited from that name recognition. 
> 
> 3\. Evelyn has always been largely supportive of Matthew's career, but now that they have a child and are planning more in the future, she thinks he should transfer to a less dangerous division, as well as because he no longer agrees with his department's priorities in what cases they are pursuing. Matthew is reluctant because he takes a good deal of pride in his job and dreads the idea of being 'stuck in a cubicle all day'. On the other hand, for all of his suspicion of Tom he still largely trusts in the Ministry as an institution (having never suffered from its negligence like Tom and Amy), and can be quite naive to the internal politics driving the entire thing beyond his department.
> 
> 4\. A major problem in this chapter is that apparating is only useful and effective when you know exactly where you want to go (and have been to that exact location before). It's even harder during any kind of fight, which is why Jaime does not immediately peace out and why Michael Applewhite believes they can still corner him in the apartment block. As to Michael's betrayal... well, I think we all have some idea who he may have gotten his orders to 'kill two birds with one stone' from. 
> 
> 5\. Matthew can't exactly just head back home now- not only is he missing his wand and maybe Jaime's prisoner, he now knows someone pretty powerful wants him dead and is willing to use hit wizards and aurors against him to do it. On the plus side... we'll be seeing some more of Jaime Isola, everyone's favorite wanted man. (Side note, Jaime knows very well that Matthew's surname is 'Abbott', it just makes him happy to constantly mistake it for something else). 
> 
> 6\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	22. Amy IX

HOGWARTS, MAY 1958

Amy finishes handing out the review packets, takes a fortifying sip of her now-nearly-cold tea, and settles against the edge of her desk. “The revision period begins on Monday, as all of you should know by now. Your Potions OWL is scheduled for twelve noon on Friday, June 13th, in the dungeons. You’ve got six weeks left with which to prepare for that, so I would suggest you all get cracking, if you haven’t already. I’ve no new material left to teach you-,”

A bold whoop from the back of the room. Amy massages the bridge of her nose, inhales more of her chamomile. 

“That’s quite enough, Mr. Fiorelli. As I was saying, I am done teaching you, but you are all still expected to put the work in. You will report here at your regular class time for study hall until the end of the month. Then you have two weeks off before exams begin. You may no longer have homework-,”

Scattered applause.

“Right, enough! You may no longer have homework, but you still need to crack open a book now and again, and practice your brewing. I promise you there will be no Outstandings for anyone who hasn’t so much as touched a cauldron in weeks. Your exam is divided between a multiple choice section, an essay question, and a brewing sample. Your essay question and your brewing will be weighed more heavily-,”

A few out-upon sighs. 

“Which is why it is crucial for you to continue to keep up the effort. I know you’re all perfectly capable of it. As a general reminder, you do need an Exceeds Expectations on the OWL to continue with this class next year. An Acceptable is not going to cut it, I’m afraid. In order to pass this class, you need an Acceptable on the exam, unless you’ve produced some really incredibly coursework for me. In that case, you should have nothing to worry about anyways.” 

They’re all shifting anxiously in their seats, eyeing the clock, waiting for the bell. It’s a Friday afternoon- why does she always feel so exhausted on Fridays?- and now that it’s the beginning of May, the weather has turned warm and fair, and although they should all be in the library bent over their schoolbooks, the majority of the student population is outside, lounging in the sun or running around, playing pick-up quidditch games or walking around the lake, gossiping. 

Amy tries to remember what else she was going to say. She’s been more scattered than usual, these past two weeks, since the wedding and then the- the news about Matthew. Her heart squeezes itself in her chest, a fist clenching an overripe fruit. She clears her throat. “I will be here for any questions or concerns you might have about the exam, beginning on Monday. You all know my office hours by now. Please do stop in if you’re feeling…” she trails off, and sets her tea cup down abruptly, “if you’re feeling overwhelmed or nervous. Thank you all for a wonderful first year of teaching. Have a good week-end.”

There’s an immediate screeching of desks and chairs against the dusty stone floor. She needs to sweep, again. Amy watches them snatch up their bags and all but bound out of the room, the corridor outside growing louder and louder as they thunder towards the stairs. She moves around her desk as Minerva McGonagall strides forward, shoes clicking neatly across the floor, trailed by Eileen Prince. Amy can’t say for sure if the two girls are really friends outside of class now, but they do seem to have warmed to each other. At least Minerva isn’t rolling her eyes and huffing left and right, and Eileen seems a bit more confident about speaking up in class. 

“Professor,” Minerva says, as Amy sweeps some papers into her own bag, then hesitates, surprisingly. “Professor- Miss, are you alright?”

Amy glances up at her, and realizes from the set of her mouth and the quick, harried movements of her hands, that she does not seem alright at all. Well, she doesn’t feel alright. She feels like she’s ready to explode, like that stupid jack-in-the-box that German boy at Wool’s had, the one- the one she went back for- what was his name? God, what was his name? She can’t remember his name. Theo? A small, tear stricken face swims in her mind’s eye. 

How old is Mattthew Abbott’s little girl now? Two? Three? 

“I’m fine, Miss McGonagall,” she says, smiling and settling her hands at her sides, smoothing down her rumpled black trousers. “Just in a rush to enjoy my weekend, like you two.”

Eileen gives a wary, pinched sort of smile. 

“We just wanted to tell you, Professor,” Minerva continues, looking skeptical, “that we’ve decided to start a tutoring service- you know, for the revisions, and then continuing next year, and we were wondering if you’d sponsor us for it, and if we could have use of the room after hours?”

Amy blinks. “Would this be a paid…”

“Yes,” Minerva says, all business savvy. “I’d quite like some money of my own- my parents don’t really do allowances, and Eileen agrees it’s a good idea.”

Eileen nods, books clutched to her thin chest.

“We’d have to discuss this with the heads,” Amy says. “I can’t just let you two run wild in here, you know. Especially if you’re going to be brewing.” She hesitates, then says, “But I am meeting with Professor Dumbledore later today, and I know he’s fond of you, Miss McGonagall, so-,”

“Right, we might branch out into Transfiguration too,” Minerva smiles grimly, hands in the pocket of her scarlet blazer. “Well, we just thought we’d let you know, Professor. It was Eileen’s idea, honestly. I’ve never tutored before.” 

Amy can believe that. She wouldn’t describe ‘patience’ as one of Minerva’s virtues. It’s rare enough in Gryffindors as it is. Eileen, on the other hand, has probably been getting hassled and coerced into helping classmates with their work for years. She’s exactly the sort of girl who gets dumped with the bulk of the work for the group project while everyone else fools around in the library, wandering the stacks and giggling to each other. 

“You must have inherited your father’s business sense,” Amy tells Eileen, fighting to keep the dryness from her voice- and the guilt. Eileen’s never given any indication of remembering much about the night of the gala, and Amy suspects she is too alienated from her parents to go to them even if her suspicions were aroused- but still. This entire year has felt like one fumbling mistake after another. And everyone but her has been paying the price for it. Jaime. Eileen. Mae. Matthew. 

Eileen looks away, shoulders hunching slightly, and mumbles something about needing to go return some library books. Minerva follows after her with a more polite goodbye, and Amy watches wearily as the door swings shut behind them. Then she empties what’s left her tea down the drain of the nearest sink. Their tutoring business is really the last thing on her mind right now, but she wasn’t lying when she said she had a meeting with Dumbledore. It’s becoming more and more of a rarity, her not lying. 

She slams her way into her office upstairs a little more aggressively than necessary, dumping her bag and some stray lesson books onto her already cluttered desk. A few of her plants need watering, so she does that while listening to the sounds from the courtyard outside; one of the younger girls must have brought a jump rope, because she can hear it slapping against the cobblestones while some witchy nursery rhyme is chanted. After a few minutes, she shuts her windows, blocking out the warm spring sunshine and the muffled shouts and laughter.

The newspaper is still in the drawer where she left it, like a guilty child hiding a bad mark on a school assignment. HERO AUROR FEARED DEAD AFTER HIT WIZARD OPERATION the title still reads. MINISTER’S CABINET REDOUBLES WORK ON BORDER SECURITY BILLS- PROMISES SAFER TRAVEL HOME AND ABROAD. In even smaller words TUFT RAILS AGAINST MINISTRY OVERREACH INTO FOREIGN AFFAIRS. 

In a more recent story, from the paper yesterday, buried beneath it- _“Matthew Abbott was an example to us all,” Minister Gaunt stated as he addressed crowds in the Ministery arboretum. “His professional career was one of hard work, fierce intelligence, and unquestionable loyalty to the values of the Department and of the Ministry at large. That he should lose his life while in pursuit of a wanted murderer- a common criminal, who is now to blame for the deaths of two courageous wizards- is appalling. His sacrifice should be a call to action for us all. For too long we have allowed the Statute to restrain us from the pursuit of justice, while simultaneously seeing it used against our own citizens. Dark wizards and witches masquerade among the muggle public, flaunting their supposed immunity from our laws by using muggle institutions and governance as shields for their misdeeds. How many brave men and women were imprisoned, censored, and silenced for attempting to come to the aid of their countrymen during the wars? The epic mismanagement of Europe’s magical communities has led to a power vacuum that produced the criminals who now terrorize us today. While Grindelwald and Hitler rose to power, we did nothing, citing our own laws as deterrents.”_

_Stone-faced, addressing near-silent and admiring onlookers, Gaunt continued, “Now we see a magical Europe weakened on a massive scale, barely keeping its head above water, and we pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, purely because Grindelwald’s forces never launched a direct attack on Great Britain? The damage is already done, and it is far more insidious than any of us could have predicted. We must reform from the ground up, and permit our valiant aurors, hit wizards, and witch watchers to use their powers to the fullest extent in the pursuit of this nation’s safety. Matthew Abbott was among our best and brightest. His family has been honored in our annals of history again and again. Rest assured, his killer will be brought to justice, and we will all strive to work towards a brighter and safer future.”_

She feels sick to her stomach all over again just reading it. Amy doesn’t believe for an instant that it’s such a grand coincidence that something should happen to Matthew- that he would be- that this would happen to him, him, specifically, of all the hundreds of aurors on the force, that in pursuit of Jaime Isola, he would be the one to-

It is undeniably, unequivocally, her fault. Whether Tom has discovered that the ring was a fake already or not scarcely seems to matter. He could have easily done this anyways. She doesn’t necessarily need to have directly provoked him to do this. He might have given the orders regardless without a second thought. But it still stands that- if not for her association with- if she hadn’t been- It is her fault. She may not share the bulk of the blame, but she certainly owes some of it. It is difficult to see this as anything other than a ripple effect of her stupid, childish, spiteful actions over a decade earlier. Would Tom even know who Matthew was, beyond him being an Abbott, if not for her? Would Matthew have even drawn his attention in the least bit, otherwise?

It’s her fault, Matthew’s death. It is her fault. She has gotten an innocent man killed because she keeps playing the same games with the same sorry results. She nearly got him killed when they were little more than children. That was due to her jealousy, and her pride, and her arrogance assumption that she could handle anything Tom threw at her, because she thought she made him vulnerable. She thought she was a weak point, for him, that she could exploit his feelings as much as he did hers. She was wrong. All she has done is given him more ammunition. He doesn’t have feelings for her anymore. He has hatred, and loathing, and fury, and she is just stoking the fire steadily with her very presence. 

This was a mistake. This was a colossal mistake, and now people are dead, and more people are likely going to die, and yes, it’s not as if Tom would be some reformed man if she weren’t in the picture, but Christ, she thought she could somehow keep him in check, even distantly, thought she was being brave, and noble, and sensible by coming back, and she was wrong. She was incredibly wrong. All she has done is put the people she cares most for in danger. She should have taken Mae, and run. At least then she would have forced him to actually expend the time and energy to chase them. Instead she waltzed right back into his reach, and what, like a moth dancing around the flame, thought she could evade being burned?

The ring- that he does not have the actual ring, that it is still tangentially in her possession, that is the only thing she has over him. She has nothing else. And even if she destroyed it- well, she’s not sure exactly what that would do, but it would not kill him outright, she’s pretty damn sure of that. So what? What is there left to do? He has spies seemingly everywhere, she’s backed herself into yet another corner because she wanted to put on a good show of defiance, Mae doesn’t trust her anymore, her students probably think she’s slowly losing her mind, Matthew’s wife and daughter have lost a husband and a father, Jaime Isola is on the run because he did her a favor, because she failed to properly warn him, because she didn’t fully understand herself-

She can’t do this. She cannot. She is not his ‘match’ in any sense. She is a struggling professor at a school which is, at this point, her only remaining safety net that Tom would hesitate to shred, she is a piss poor mother to a daughter who’s been fed nothing but lies and more lies since birth, she’s a lapsed healer who’s done nothing but get people hurt on her behalf since she changed careers- She thought he would kill her, and it would be someone else’s problem then. 

That is the ugly truth of it. She thought she would probably be dead by now, and Mae- someone would take Mae away, or Dumbledore would keep Mae safe at Hogwarts until she came of age- she doesn’t know what she thought. She thought she’d get the last laugh. She thought he’d kill her, carry on happily enough, thinking he’d won, then eventually realize the ring was a fake, and lose his mind, but it’d be too late, because Jaime would have gotten it to Dumbledore, or tipped him off, somehow, and-

And what? The real heroes would swoop in and fix everything, while she got to go down as the noble sacrifice? Mae would hate her. Mae would hate her for dying, and at this rate, she might just come to hate her all the same for living. 

Amy buries her head in her arms atop her desk for a few moments, breathing deeply, in and out. Even now, she’s still holding out some deranged hope that Dumbledore is going to present a perfect solution. That someone else is going to come save the day. No one is coming. She doesn’t know why she’d even allow herself to think that. It’s not as if anyone was coming to save her when she was little, and she thinks if she ever had a guardian angel, they probably took a header down to Hell years back, seeing the state of her life. She is not a good person. What she is, is a weak person who made excuses and justified a very bad person’s actions for years, and now she’s paying for it. She could have put an end to this- she could have stopped this when they were young. 

She could have. She should have spilled her guts in Dippet’s office years and years ago. And now it is too late. She no longer has the excuse of youth and naivety. She’s not some innocent little girl anymore, she’s a grown woman with responsibilities and so far she’s done a pretty decent job of failing at most of them. Her eyes are stinging. She is not going to cry. It’s self indulgent. She’s always felt that way. It’s self pitying and self indulgent. Like she’s patting herself on the back for her grief and guilt. She doesn’t get to cry over this. She locks her arms under her chest instead, in some parody of self-comfort, like she used to when she was very small and nervous. Digs her fingernails into her ribcage. 

She could… she could go to him. Tom, that is. Just… would it be so hard, really? To… to play into expectations. If she went to him, and she… she let him see what he wanted, which was her completely heartbroken, guilt-ridden, self-loathing, if she… If she did- tell him the truth, about Mae, at least, she might be able to- just to- To get him to… She doesn’t doubt that he would still hate her. He will always hate her, as she hates him. But he wouldn’t- he might not- he might not hurt Mae. And if she could… take that particular threat out of the picture, then she might be able to work on him, get him to… to settle, a little, and no one else- no one else she cares about, at least- they might not be in the line of fire anymore. If she just… centered things back on her, and- 

_And what_ , a mocking little voice says, _and what, Amy? You think he’d sweep Mae into his arms for a fatherly hug, kick you around a little, and call it a day? Really? You’re crawling and begging, now? He should have started killing your friends years ago, if this was all it took._

She could do it, though. If you can’t run, you walk, if you can’t walk, you crawl, and hug the walls to avoid the creaky floorboard. She knows she could. It’s just a matter of focus, and maybe if she gave him one specific hurt to tend to- making up for lost time with- with Mae, and raging at her for keeping something… something he’d see as his, from him- It might… distract him. Keep him preoccupied, shake him off his pedestal a little. A slash to the artery is more pressing than some minor scrapes and bruises. She’s always known where to cut deep, with him. 

_Or maybe_ , the voice says, _you’d push him so far over the edge he’d kill you both and be done with it. Maybe he’d kill her first, and make you watch, and then not give you the relief of dying afterwards. Have you thought about that?_

She’s a heinous excuse for a mother. What kind of woman willingly considers leading her child into the lion’s den because she’s worried about the rest of the flock? Her- what, some hopeful hunch that he might not outright hurt or kill Mae, that makes it alright? That excuses this delusional… Amy lets go of herself, disgusted, stomach roiling. She should be disgusted. This is disgusting. She’s vile to have even considered it. Mae should be- Mae is her first and foremost priority, and if she has to choose- if it’s the world or Mae, it’s Mae, because that is her entire world boiled down into one small body. It is loathsome, that she would ever consider, what, going to him and begging, and apologizing, not meaning it in the least, out of some wretched desire to absolve her own guilt, to keep him from lashing out-

If it hadn’t been Matthew, it would have been someone else, some other innocent person who’s death could be used as fodder for his political agenda. But it might not make her feel like vomiting all the time.

“Lemon drop?” Dumbledore asks, two hours later, pushing the small glass bowl towards her when she stares at him in response. It looks like something someone’s grandmother would keep in their parlor. 

They are not in a grandmotherly parlor. They are in his spacious office, located next to the fourth floor Transfiguration classroom, with an appealing view of the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw towers, and perilously close to the the tolling clock tower, which means, if not for magical sound muffling, it would be deafening in this room for a few moments every hour. Amy has been in his office before, of course, and it is virtually unchanged from the way it looked in December, aside from a few different potted plants, some new books on his desk, and Fawkes’ new flush of scarlet feathers. Amy’s never been sure how to feel about phoenixes. He sort of reminds her of of a cross between a tropical parrot and a vulture. 

She eyes Fawkes suspiciously as he rips the head off some rodent, rustling around on his gilded perch.

“No, thank you.”

They settle into a silence that would be uncomfortable if not for Dumbledore’s habit of breaking eye contact just before it would get excruciating, and humming to himself a little. Amy has no idea if it’s just a ploy to set her at ease, or if he genuinely does not care how long it takes them to get to the point. 

“I am sorry,” he says, finally, in a gentle sort of tone that makes her want to throw something, “to have heard the news about Matthew Abbott. I didn’t know him as well as I might have, when he was a student here. But I’m told he was a good friend to many. And he grew into an exceptionally brave man.”

Does he know it all links back to her? Is this his way of stirring the pot of guilt bubbling over in her belly even further? But she’d never thought of Dumbledore as the spiteful type. Oh, she has no doubt he’s far more calculating than he leads people to believe, but she’s never detected a hint of scorn or contempt from him. Maybe around Tom. She’s never seen them interact in private. Maybe Tom once sat across from him, at this desk, and they played a verbal chess match or two, and Dumbledore brooded and dwelt on it while Tom adjusted his mask of respectful indulgence towards a grandfatherly sort of teacher.

“I’m going to say something,” she finally announces, picking at the armrests of her chair. “So before I do, if there is any chance that anyone- I mean, anyone- could somehow infiltrate this room to listen in on conversations, you had better tell me now. Sir.”

He steeples his long fingers under his flowing beard, looks at her steadily from behind his glasses, and intones, “This room is secure. And there is no need to address me as sir, Professor Benson. We have been colleagues for the better part of a year, now.”

“Old habits,” Amy says, and then, because what is the point in delaying it any longer? “Carmody is spying for the Knights. Her and her husband are members. Did you know?”

Dumbledore does not so much as blink. “I had suspicions a member of the staff was loyal to Tom’s… aspirations, even after Horace’s sudden departure. I had hoped I was wrong. An old man’s paranoia.” His smile is very thin and tired. “June has not had an easy life. I had thought her change in careers…” He exhales. “Might be a new leaf for her.”

“Her husband works with Tom. Or- he did work with Tom, in the same office, before the election.”

“I confess I don’t know Arthur Norbrook half so well as I do his wife,” Dumbledore says calmly. “I can’t claim to know the reasons behind his loyalty to Tom, or the ideals of the Knights of Walpurgis. He does not come from a pureblooded family. But not all of them do. Purebloods are rapidly becoming as much of a minority as muggleborns, in our world. Some estimate that in another fifty years, the majority of the wizarding communities will be populated by halfbloods. Children of both magical and muggle descent. Some welcome this as a more peaceful future. One of understanding. But not all.”

“I don’t give a damn what their motives are,” Amy says. “She’s a teacher. Children are exposed to her- every day, my daughter sits in her class, and you didn’t think to- you should have given me more warning.” She leans forward slightly in her seat. “You haven’t told me everything.”

He arches a pale eyebrow. “I believe we have that much in common.”

Amy flushes red in shame, or guilt, or anger. All three, most likely. “You’re right,” she says, after another moment. “I- I didn’t tell you everything. I didn’t want to- I thought I could…”

“You were trying to do what you thought best for yourself and your child,” Dumbledore says. “I have no intention of holding that against you, Amy.” He clears his throat. “But in the interest of transparency, I think we had best both begin to grow a little more comfortable with sharing truths. However painful said truths may be.”

Amy looks down at her lap. He selects a lemon drop, unwraps it, and offers it to Fawkes, who swallows the candy whole with an ungodly sort of warbling screech.

“Tom made a horcrux,” she says, without looking back up.

Silence, from both the man and the bird.

“I didn’t know. When I- I found out he murdered them, the Riddles, you must… you must have heard about that, Morfinn Gaunt, they arrested him, but it wasn’t- you know it wasn’t him.”

“I knew Morfinn Gaunt was perfectly capable of the crime. However, I did not believe he was the only man in his family capable of cold-blooded murder.”

“I suppose he- he must have made it from them.” Amy’s eyes are stinging again. She sucks in a quick breath, and looks back up. Dumbledore’s expression is slightly troubled, but otherwise inscrutable, as always. “You have to kill someone to do that, don’t you, to… to split your soul? I didn’t know. I thought maybe… he’d done something with the ring, when I took it, but I didn’t know that was what it was.”

“When did the ring come into your possession?” Dumbledore asks, rather mildly, given the subject matter.

“June- the June we graduated,” Amy says. “1945.” It feels like a lifetime away. “I… I knew I was going to leave, and I didn’t want him to- to follow. So I threatened him. I drugged him with a potion and I told him I knew about the murders and I took the ring with me.”

“You’ve carried a horcrux with you for over a decade?” He sounds concerned. For her, or someone else, she’s not sure.

“No,” Amy says. “I… I only ever kept it on me for the… the first nine months.” The last three words are barely above a whisper.

“Of the pregnancy,” he concludes.

“Yes.” Does she really have to say it?

“And how did it effect you, the horcrux?” he presses.

Amy frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Horcruxes are trapped pieces of souls contained into a material object. The soul tends to dislike being mutilated and divorced from its body. It tends to… lash out. Especially in the presence of another, foreign body. Many have unwittingly come into the possession of horcruxes before.”

“The possession of?” She doesn’t like the sound of that. 

“It promotes… darker thoughts and impulses. Negative feelings. Suspicion. Paranoia. Intense envy and anger towards others, even loved ones.”

“I never…” Her pregnancy had been no stroll in the park. Of course she’d felt poorly, been grief-stricken, and frightened, and upset. But she doesn’t remember feeling… Paranoid, maybe, but she doesn’t recall any particularly dark thoughts, no impulses to hurt anyone, or lash out at others. She’d kept her head down and done her job. She’d gotten on with life as best she could. “I don’t remember any of that. I mean, it would- it would burn, sometimes, against my skin, and I’d have nightmares, once in a while, but never…” She stops talking. She doesn’t need to go into that much detail, surely. 

“I see,” Dumbledore says. She’s not sure he does. “And after the birth of your daughter, what happened to the ring?”

“I kept it with us,” Amy says. “In the… in our flat, but locked up. I didn’t want to wear it on me, and I- I thought I might still be able to use it against him, someday, so I didn’t want to get rid of it, either. I thought maybe he’d put a curse on it, of some kind. But not a tracking one, otherwise he’d have found me immediately.”

Dumbledore inclines his head. “And when did you discover it’s true nature?”

“Last year,” Amy says. Feels almost ashamed of that, too, as if she didn’t do her due diligence. It’s not as if she had anything else to worry about, after all. Just a struggling healing clinic and a rambunctious child to look after. “Once he… he contacted me, and I was thinking about taking the job here, I brought it someone. A cursebreaker I knew.”

“Mister Isola, I presume,” Dumbledore comments, dryly.

Amy nods. “I shouldn’t have brought it to him. I just- I wasn’t thinking about what could go wrong. How it might involve him. It was stupid of me. But he was able to make a copy, of it, you know, a convincing one. So I thought… if it came down to it, and I had to hand it over… I could give Tom the fake. Keep the real one hidden, and if he had what he thought was the ring, then that means I would be… dead… and it’d be too late. He’d never know where the real one was.”

“Does anyone other than yourself know its location?”

“Jaime Isola does. Roughly. I gave him enough information to work it out. In case I was… after I was gone,” she says roughly, “he was supposed to contact you with that, and then I thought, at least… someone else would have it, someone who had… power.”

“I think you have more power than yourself and many others assume, Amy,” Dumbledore says, again that mild tone. 

She all but scoffs. “Is that why I’m here, then? Telling you all this? Because I’m so powerful? Because I failed?”

“Failure is often highly subjective.” He smiles slightly. God, that is infuriating. Then it vanishes. “I presume Tom has the counterfeit ring by now?”

“Yes. He… threatened me. Threatened Mae.”

“His daughter.” Any ounce of mildness has disappeared from Dumbledore’s tone. 

“He doesn’t know,” she says. 

Those steely blue eyes widen ever so slightly. “Doesn’t know, or is unwilling to acknowledge?”

“He thinks I… that it’s some scheme I concocted. To protect myself from him. Pretending to have his child. Like the girl trying to keep her boyfriend from running off and marrying someone else,” the words curdle and sour on her lips. 

“I see,” Dumbledore says, again.

“Did you know?” she presses.

“I thought it possible,” he admits. “But it is not my place to pry into such personal matters.” Right. Because he’s clearly so uninvested in all of this. 

“Well, at this rate, looks like he’ll be the last to find out.” She wants to laugh, but is afraid it will be more of a throaty rasp. 

“That may be for the best,” Dumbledore says, in a slightly gentler tone. “Tom has a… well, I’m sure you’re aware of his interest in keeping things to himself.”

“Yes,” she says. “He doesn’t like to share.”

“I’m familiar with the sort.” Again that thin, almost razor sharp smile. 

“So there you have it,” she says. “He has the fake. He may already have found it out. What happened to Matthew is my fault. Tom’s threatened him before. All my friends, really. Anyone he knows I care for. Guess he got tired of just threatening, decided to make good on it.” She looks down again. “And of course it really suits his politics, doesn’t it? Hero auror killed in the line of duty? By some horrible foreigner in a muggle city?”

“Amy,” Dumbledore shifts in his own seat. “Look at me.”

She looks up, begrudgingly. His expression is like stone. “This is not your fault,” he says, very clearly, almost cuttingly. “You must come to understand this. His actions are not yours to bear. Believe me. I have spent many, many years blaming myself for-,” he pauses, as if to collect himself, “I am not an innocent. I’ve lived much longer than you, and collected far more to feel very justified guilt over. But I have learned how to avoid the trap of blaming myself for things out of my control. Matthew Abbott’s death was not your doing. Whatever threats Tom makes, or sees fit to carry out- you cannot control this.”

“I’ve controlled it before,” she says, through her teeth.

He looks at her sympathetically. “You may have believed you could. But his will is just as free as your own, or any other human beings. The only one to hold accountable for his actions, be they good or evil, is him.” 

“I could have stopped it. I’ve- I was reckless. And stupid. I thought I could… I don’t know what I thought. But I was wrong. Bringing Mae here, subjecting her to-,”

“Does she know?” he inquires, very quietly.

“No,” Amy admits.

“Do you plan to tell her?”

“Someday. When it’s- when she can understand.”

“She may never understand,” he says. “You will have to come to accept that, as well.”

“Sometimes I don’t understand, either,” she mutters, then says, a little louder. “But it doesn’t matter. Not anymore. What matters is keeping her safe. I can’t- we can’t stay here, Carmody is-,”

“If June Carmody was going to hurt your daughter, she would have already,” Dumbledore informs her. “She has had months of the two of you unsuspecting, months to get close to you, to ingratiate herself to you and Mae. She could have isolated Mae at any time between the start of term and now. She has not. And she cannot… it is nearly impossible,” he says, “for anyone to forcefully remove a child from these grounds without our knowing. Hogwarts was designed to keep students in as much as it was designed to keep the outside world away. No. I don’t believe she’s been ordered to do anything nearly so direct.”

“Then why is she here?” Amy demands. Although maybe he does have a point.

“To observe,” he says. “That would be my wager, at the very least. To observe, and to regularly report back. To ensure that there is nothing untoward brewing here, that I am not forming some sort of… wretched alliance of schoolteachers, working together to bring about the government’s downfall behind closed doors.” He almost looks like he might chuckle. “No. It’s for the best that we know, and she does not. It is safest when one can see the snake in the grass long before it’s close enough to strike.”

“So what? We just let her spy?” Amy has to clench her hands together in her lap to keep from digging her nails into something.

“That would be my inclination, yes. Tom might have been better served by recruiting someone with a less… demanding role than a professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts. As it stands, I am content to let the matter lie for now.”

“You like waiting things out,” she accuses.

“I do,” he says. “I find it avoids much needless strife and heartbreak, waiting. But not forever.”

He certainly waited long enough to take out Grindelwald, but as angry as Amy is, she’s not bold enough to bring that up right now.

“But there are other matters that I don’t believe should be delayed any longer,” he comments. “Tom’s election has galvanized many into action. The Knights are growing bolder, more pervasive, less leery of public attention. The Ministry is testing new powers. The Sacred Twenty Eight are responding more aggressively to what they view as encroaching threats on their way of life. But the same is true for many others who are less than sympathetic towards Tom. I’ve had very many letters, from very many different sources… all claiming a mutual desire to…” He pauses. “Shall we say, begin a counter-offense.”

“They want to fight back,” she says, dubiously. “He’s the Minister for Magic. He controls the entire government, all our law enforcement, the borders-,”

“He does not yet control our independent wills,” Dumbledore says. “Now, you are certainly free to do as you like. If you believe it is in Mae’s best interests for you to leave Britain immediately, I encourage you to do so before it becomes, legally speaking, much more difficult. Tom is about to be very engaged this summer- state sanctioned visits to France, Italy, and Germany, among other countries,” he says. “His first tour abroad, to my knowledge. If you wish to run, Amy, now is the time. Another continent, perhaps. But if you decide to stay… I have no doubt you could prove incredibly value to any collective effort to curtail Tom’s growing power.”

“And how would we do that?” she asks, brow furrowed.

“Well,” Dumbledore smiles again. “Tom is not the only one capable of beginning an order of like-minded individuals, whose combined skills and resources might prove very useful.”

Fawkes screeches again, flaps off his perch, and soars through an open window, out into the spring air. Amy watches him go, swallows hard, and looks back to Dumbledore. “If I stay,” she says, “I want your oath that you will do everything within your power to keep my daughter safe. Whether I’m alive or not.”

“You have my word,” he replies, readily.

“I want more than your word,” she says, in a cold voice that she does not entirely recognize.

She’d made reluctant plans a few days ago to spend the Friday evening with Sid and Iris- usually they sit and drink and complain about their week, occasionally they play some silly board or party game, once or twice they went out to eat, and often Iris enjoys subjecting them all to her taste in music, but tonight Sid arrives alone. Amy feels as though it’s been weeks since she spent time just- being around people she considers friends, and as worried and overwhelmed as she still feels, the lingering, tingling warmth roping around her right arm, seared into her skin from the Vow, is a little reassuring. 

Tom is still afraid of one person here, after all.

“Iris couldn’t make it,” he says, stepping into her rooms- it’s not nearly as cozy up here in the castle as it at the cottage, but she’s put up some artwork and laid down some rugs, and there is something comforting about looking out the window and seeing the towering castle walls surrounding her. Besides, she’s managed to properly ward the doors, just in case June tries snooping at any point, and all the professors’ private quarters are charmed for security and privacy to begin with. “Family troubles.”

“Really?” Amy looks up from the book she’d been distractedly flipping through. She still doesn’t know all that much about Iris’ family, only that she has an elder sister and was raised primarily by a quite severe aunt. “Is someone ill?”

“Her mother’s been poorly, as of late. But it’s one of those years, you know,” he says, sitting down in an armchair in front of one of her bookshelves, sighing as he kicks off his shoes. 

Amy frowns. “What years?”

Sidney shoots her an incredulous look. “You don’t know?”

“Sid,” she says, in exasperation. “Muggleborn who hasn’t been back to England in years.”

He rolls his eyes a little, but cracks a small, tired smile. “Right. Well, she doesn’t like to talk about it much, anyways, but you were bound to find out at some point. Her mother is Rosamund Penvenen.”

The name does sound vaguely familiar, now that she thinks about it. “Is she… famous?”

“More like infamous. Her mother is the most notable seer of this century, Amy. She delivered her first prophecy as a student here herself, in 1906. She’s had one every thirteen years since then.”

The math doesn’t take very long to do in her head. “1958… is she delivering a prophecy this year? Right now?” Amy took Divination for three years, then promptly dropped it after the OWL. She wasn’t quite as contemptuous of it as many of her classmates, but it wasn’t for her, either. She prefers to keep things a little more concrete.

“Right now, in a few months… who knows,” he shrugs again. “Point is, this is her year. And it’s never gotten any easier for Iris. Oracles do not the most… attentive of mothers make, I’m afraid.”

Amy wonders what that would be like, to have a parent, but for them to be so distant from you. “That must be difficult for her.”

“It is,” Sid says. “She lost her father when she was very young, on top of everything else.” His tone lowers slightly. “That makes two of us.”

Amy blinks. “I had no idea.”

He waves her off. “I don’t like to- well, it was years ago. Hardly matters now. He was a wizard. My mother was a muggle. Domestic life didn’t suit him, he left her with two young boys who she had no idea how to handle. We made the best of things without him.” 

She stands abruptly, heart wrenching once again. “You need a drink.” She’d had about enough stress for one day. “I need a drink.”

“I thought we were having one anyways.” To her relief, he doesn’t sound annoyed or hurt by her lack of a sympathetic outpouring. Maybe he understands. 

“Well, we’ll have a toast, then,” she pours them both a glass of scotch. “To… making the best of things. Despite all the shite life throws your way.”

He clinks his to hers, they both drink, she swallows the wrong way and starts to cough, he laughs, and they still manage to pass an enjoyable enough evening, despite the lack of Iris’ sunny disposition and gossip trading. Sid is easy to talk to; she’s always thought that, but now, alone in his company, feels it more keenly. Feels that this is… That this could have been something she’d had, someone to speak to, someone with who there were no games or dancing back and forth around topics. Does it have to do with Matthew? With what might have been? Or is she just eager to forget?

Either way, she’s always been skilled shoving things out her mind for the time being, at neatly tucking the unpleasant thoughts away. They talk about their classes, about individual students they share, about their worries for the revisions, about which of their colleagues annoy them the most- Nigel Romilly is up there, they both agree, bloody snob. About the better parts of this year. The welcome spring shower last week that saw students running around and splashing through puddles like little children. The wildflowers coming into full bloom in the hills around the village. The new broom repair shop opening up in Hogsmeade. The quidditch world cup in Belgium this summer. 

Later, about when they ought to be saying goodnight, but for some reason- he is no rush to go, and though she knows he would leave immediately if she asked, she is no hurry to let him, because there is something reassuring about having someone else’s presence with her, someone who doesn’t know- well, who only knows her as this, not as the girl she was, not as the things she’s done, the things she should have done-

“Do you ever regret it,” she asks, “becoming a professor? You know, not… settling down yourself?”

He blinks tiredly at her; some of his feathery brown hair, longer than it was at the start of the school year, is falling across his boyish, freckled brow. “Now why,” he says, “would I regret a thing like that? I think most here aren’t really the… settling sort. It’s Hogwarts. It attracts… well, you know. The ones who came here looking for a home. Then they found it. And they just never left.”

Amy has never heard it put that way before, but it makes sense, or maybe it makes sense after two drinks. She smiles at him- she’s smiled before, she’s always smiling, but- this is different. He smiles back, then seems to realize that they’ve moved closer together over the course of the past hour, and starts to stand. “Merlin, it’s gotten late. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be keeping you up like this- I forget we’re not all night owls.”

He’s nervous. She is suddenly a little nervous, too. But not in an unpleasant, dreading sort of way. She’d forgotten there could be other sorts of nerves. It hasn’t been forever. But it has been a little while. 

Their knuckles brush together as he stands. He’s such a slight man, he’s only four inches taller than her, whereas most men tend to be a good head or two above her. Amy finds it almost charming. “You do want me to get going,” he says, slowly, “don’t you?”

She feels a sudden flash of that pitiful guilt. What is she doing? Why is she ruining this? He’s a friend. He’s a friend, and she’s making this something it’s not. She’s acting like a child. But she doesn’t say anything. 

“Amy,” he says. “I-,”

“Thank you,” she says, impulsively, tries to just make it a goodnight, aims for his cheek with her lips. That’s alright. That has to be alright, they are friends, women her age kiss friends on the cheek all the time- He turns, and her lips brush his instead. He draws back again. 

“I don’t want to-,”

“I’m sorry,” she says, tongue thick, crimson. “That was- I don’t know why I- I’m so sorry, Sidney-,”

“Only if you’re sure,” he insists, to her surprise. “That’s not- that’s the only thing. If you’re sure-,”

She isn’t sure. Isn’t sure she should be doing this, knows she shouldn’t, she doesn’t get to- this is selfish, it’s wrong. The odd one night stand on the rare occasions when she could safely leave Mae home with Teddy and Patsy, that was- that was just a release, a brief, pleasant break from her every day life. He’s a colleague. This is different. She shouldn’t. She should be sure this can’t happen. Not even once. Not even-

“I’m sure,” she says, because she is sure she just wants to forget, for one single night, that her life has gradually narrowed until she can’t even see all the exits and entrances anymore. She is sure she doesn’t want to be alone in bed tonight, hating herself, hating him. 

Their second kiss is no tentative brushing of lips. He’s good, too. She hasn’t done very much kissing in a very long time, but he is good, isn’t too forceful or too timid, doesn’t put his hands anywhere that she does not guide them to first, doesn’t push her back onto the chair or try to, god forbid, pick her up like some bloody caveman- They kiss for a good, long, while, sinking down into a sort of huddle over the arm chair, and then, when her back starts to hurt and she can feel his one leg jittering, she extricates herself and takes him by the hand.

“You’re sure,” he repeats. “You can send me out now, and I promise I’ll still go to bed a happy man.” His smile is sheepishly delighted. No one has- no one has smiled like that at her since she was a teenager. 

“You’re going to bed a happy man,” she tells him, “with company.”

She brings him to hers, closing the curtains as she does so, almost savagely smug in the fact that June Carmody is currently in bed with her own husband in their little home in the village. Good. Let’s both of them have a happy start to their weekend. God knows she feels she deserves at least a fraction of this, however selfish it may be. He is still working on his trousers once she’s stripped down to her plain slip and her dowdy, worn stockings.

Sid chuckles at the sight. 

“Quiet, you,” she says, pulling them off. “What did you expect, a lace garter belt?”

“I didn’t expect any of this,” he says, but gladly moves over at her approach, running his hands almost hesitantly up and down her bare arms. “What’s the plan? I clamber out the window at dawn?”

“What?” she breathes, clambering into his lap. “Disappointed we’re not higher up, Mister 6th Airborne Division?”

One hand cups the small of her back. The other moves from her hair to the side of her chest, thumbing at the rumpled pleat of her slip. “Cut me to the quick, why don't you.” 

She smiles, fights back the lump in her throat, and kisses his neck. “I’ll make it up to you.”

Later, she dreams something she has not in years. The narrow bed, almost too cramped for two adult bodies, becomes a body of water, and within its dark sheets she promptly sinks. It is not a warm, breezy spring night, and she is not behind safe castle walls. She is floundering, dazed from the gash on her head, fighting to keep above the surface, weighed down by heavy winter clothes and boots. The icy forest pool closes over her, like a mouth swallowing her whole. Amy sinks, and the light is wrenched away, and the cold settles around her like a shroud, muffling everything but the sound of her heartbeat. Her eyes flutter closed. It is not so terrible, to sink. She should have tried it more often. Easier than falling. Easier than fighting. 

The ring, hidden under a thick winter coat and a woolen scarf, burn and sears against her sternum. The pain jerks her back into panicked consciousness. She kicks, struggles against the downward pull, kicks and pumps her arms. Breaks the surface once more, the burning in her chest hastening her every moment, she has to make it stop, she has to get it to stop- Amy gasps for breath, takes several, and manages to struggle to the shallows, on her hands and knees, panting, in the frigid water. The forest around her is lit by the dusk and full of terrifying sounds and shapes, covered in early snow. Someone screams her name, a jet of light races overhead, and she crawls forward, teeth clenched, wand in hand, as the burning finally recedes. 

Now she lies awake, besides Sidney’s peacefully slumbering frame, staring at the ceiling. Nightmares are worse, Amy has always found, when they’re rooted in the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. So if this were a TV show, this would probably be the season 1 finale. I know it's been a wild ride so far, and to be honest my outline for this fic is more vague (compared to my ASOIAF fics, for example) but overall it's allowed to me to be a little flexible and change things as I go along, while still (hopefully) keeping to the same overall plot and character arcs. I really appreciate everyone's feedback and willingness to embrace so many random characters and plotlines in a very niche, weird fic. 
> 
> 2\. Amy spends this chapter in a state of emotional turmoil and some serious indecisiveness. I know this may seem out of character for her, as she's usually pretty determined and keeps a cool head, but I felt that it'd be wrong to downplay her genuine distress and grief over Matthew's 'presumed death', and it's probably not realistic to expect anyone in her position to keep it together all the time. Does that mean all the decisions she's made so far are wise? Probably not. Tom's not the only one who can spend time living in denial or make choices rooted in emotions, be they positive or negative.
> 
> 3\. Tom has used Matthew's death to galvanize some of his political agendas. One of his main issues that he's advocating for seems to be the fact that the Statute of Secrecy heavily limits what wizards can do, both to stop magical and muggle evil. A lot of wizards and witches with good intentions wound up in prison as a result of them 'interfering' in World War 2. And many of Grindelwald's followers managed to repeatedly avoid capture by essentially using muggles as meat shields. In addition, the massive power vacuum left after Grindelwald's rampage through Europe has left a lot of their magical governments severely weakened and vulnerable, as he took out a ton of state heads and it basically led to some years of anarchy even after his death. In comparison, magical Britain has managed to stay fairly stable and secure (for now). 
> 
> 4\. In a moment of weakness, Amy genuinely considers telling Tom the truth- ie. that Mae is his daughter, in some attempt to negotiate with him against any more overt acts of violence. Basically hoping 'well, maybe he'd be so wrapped up in this revelation that he might back off from hurting anyone else but me for the time being'. Obviously she pretty quickly discards even the suggestion of this plan.
> 
> 5\. Dumbledore is doing his Dumbledore sketchy thing, and definitely has a vested interest in keeping Amy from going on the run with Mae. He successfully manages to convince her to stay put for the time being, reasoning that they temporarily have an advantage over Carmody's spying since she doesn't know they know, and that it is near impossible to hurt or take Mae from Hogwarts without being immediately discovered. Amy decides to hold him to this assurance, this time, and breaks out the big guns. "But doesn't it take three people to complete an Unbreakable Vow?" I have zero qualms at this point about kicking canon around until it does what I want. Also, that makes little sense to me. Wouldn't you naturally want a spell of that nature to require as few people as possible present? You know, 'three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead'?
> 
> 6\. Tom is going to be away for a large part of the summer on the customary visits to other magical nations, and while the cat's away...
> 
> 7\. "Amy, what the fuck! Tom just supposedly had an ex-boyfriend killed off, and you're hooking up with a colleague!" Mostly I think Amy is afraid, and feeling isolated and lonely and stressed, and she very much is a person who craves affection and who feels good about being wanted by someone. I think it has less to do with passionate romantic feelings and more about just wanting to feel close to someone who doesn't know all her dirty secrets and who just sees her as a friend and peer whom they respect and admire. Amy is an adult woman who has a sexuality and who has participated in casual safe sex before and who probably will again. That's just the reality of it. It doesn't mean she intends to put others in danger for the sake of her own pleasure, and she is careful to note that tonight June is safely well away from the castle and has no way of witnessing this.
> 
> 8\. Amy's dream/memory is somewhat of a brief foreshadowing for some future chapters in this fic. Not every chapter or section of every chapter will be set in the 'present' ie. 1958. I will try to keep the flashbacks to a minimum as I know they can be frustrating when you just want the plot to progress. As always, you can find me on my blog at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	23. Tom IV - Mae VIII

HOGSMEADE, JUNE 1945

His mouth feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton. That is his first cognizant thought. The second is that all his limbs feel slightly heavy and stiff, as if he’d fallen asleep sitting up. The third is that he is missing his socks and shoes, and the dewy morning glass is licking at his bare feet. Slowly, haltingly, Tom sits up, squinting in the early morning light. The sun is rising over the lake, sending shafts of golden light across its dark surface. It’s slightly cooler and crisper than the night before, but not so cold as to make him outright shiver or wish for a jacket. His dress shirt is wrinkled and covered in grass stains, as are his rumpled trousers. 

He licks his lips and around his teeth, wondering what could have caused such a horrific aftertaste, and if he might have drunk enough to be feeling the natural effects the morning after. His head is pounding, although it feels more like pressure than outright pain, and he blinks, hard, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He can’t believe they fell asleep out here. He blames her, naturally. She’s always made him behave so rashly, without considering the immediate consequences. Now they’ll have to hurry back to the castle to avoid detection, and she’s never been a morning person. He’ll have to all but drag her.

“Amy,” he says, without really looking, reaching out to the space beside him, where the bundle of his jacket and a half-full book bag lies, where he naturally assumes she will be curled up, asleep, her unconscious face turned towards him, as it always seems to be. Where he thought his fingers would meet with fabric and flesh, there is only cool, misty morning air. Tom looks around, properly. He is completely alone on the waterfront. For a baffled moment he wonders if she woke up before him and decided to go for a swim in lieu of showering. That seems like something she might find perfectly acceptable. She always loved the water. 

Then he remembers.

It feels like something just punched through his chest; a definitive puncture, a release of air. He gasps aloud, recoiling from the invisible force of the memories, and scrambles to his feet, lurching slightly, as if set upon by wasps. “Amy!” He calls out, but aside from the breeze rustling through the trees, and the sounds of the waters of the lake moving gently upon the shore, there is silence. He coughs, suddenly terribly thirsty, and feels both his head and stomach swim. No. No. It’s not- this isn’t right. It didn’t happen like that. It couldn’t have, he’s- he’s confusing reality with a nightmare, he’s not remembering things properly because he’s hungover, there is some explanation, there is always an explanation-

“Amy!” He calls again, but she’s not there. Tom scans his surroundings, still somehow certain this is all a misunderstanding, that he’s simply deluded, panicking for no reason, that he will see her emerge from the treeline in an instant, glaring at him in exasperation, snapping about how she needed to relieve herself, couldn’t he wait five bloody minutes before yelling his head off- But she’s not there. If she woke up first she would have woken him, too. She always has. She’s incapable of it, always stretching and yawning and muttering to herself. Once she inadvertently elbowed him in the ear while extricating herself from the blankets. He’d pinned her underneath him retaliation, dissatisfied with her protests that it’d been an accident, and had promptly been bucked off once she started tickling his ribs, snickering about the disgruntled look on his face. 

Standing there helplessly, he is forced to think on the memories of the night before, and the wave of nausea hits him like a train. Tom doubles over, vomiting up not only the potion but his dinner from the night before, and staggers into the cold shallows, leaving a trail of sick after him. He keeps vomiting until he’s only producing yellow bile, then crumples to a loose, shaky crouch, exhausted. What did she give him? He feels at his forehead, but it’s not hot, so he can’t be running a fever. Tom wipes at his mouth and chin, then douses his face with frigid lake water in an attempt to shock himself into thinking about this more rationally.

He stands back up. She drugged him. He cannot deny that fact. That’s not up for debate. She spiked his drink for the express purpose of- of- of incapacitating him, so he couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t- couldn’t pursue her. He massages the bridge of his nose, forcing himself to remember the events directly preceding it. The tendrils of hair around her round face had glowed in the moonlight, a strange greenish brown sheen. He remembers his hands on her hips, watching the slow, pendulous movement of his ring against her bare chest. 

The crickets chirping in the trees and the sound of their breathing. The thin protection of the faded blanket underneath them, the only barrier between his back and the ground. He was too tall for it; his ankles had gone off the edge and into the wet grass, but afterwards, he’d brought up his knees, and she’d slumped between them, her fingers digging into the sides of his thighs. Then she’d extricated herself, ignoring his protests, and moved up alongside him instead, the way she preferred to sleep afterwards, tugging on his arms like he was a mannequin she was trying to maneuver. After some grumbling, he’d conceded and let her bury her head against his chest, smelling her cheap shampoo and the perfume she’d put on hours before, now mixed with sweat. 

He supposes they could have lain like that for a while longer, but he didn’t much fancy the idea of being so exposed while out in the open, no matter how secluded the grove was. After a few silent minutes he’d pushed her off him so he could sit up and put his clothes back on, or at least his trousers. She laid there on the blanket, watching him, for another moment, and then had inelegantly clambered up herself, pulling on her own clothes, saving her blouse for last. 

He liked her in white blouses. It made her look- he wasn’t sure what it made her look like. ‘Pure’ was not the word for it, and it had nothing to do with schoolgirl uniforms. It had always looked very natural on her, he’d concluded at some point, particularly when it was rumpled and half-buttoned, with her hair caught in the collar, and her eyes biting at him, daring him to say something while she fixed her appearance, crouched on her haunches, elbows resting on her knees like a boy. 

“I love you,” she’d said, as she finished doing up her blouse, straightening the shoulders. 

“I know,” he’d replied, confidently, contentedly. She loved him. He had felt in that moment that there was nothing she could ask of him that he would not do. She loved him. They had never said it before, during, or after any of their other times. Only this one. This and all the ones after it, he’d concluded. He wanted to hear her say it. He supposes it was pathetic and childish of him, to crave the reassurance, but he’d rather her say it. Just to be certain. Just to be sure he had not invented this in his head. 

What was the point in waiting, he’d thought, then, watching her from his languid position, as she reached for the thermos. It was ridiculous to even consider trying to arrange separate housing for one another while starting their respective careers. They could go down to the Ministry this very weekend and register a marriage in one of the offices. He was sure they took appointments. They needn’t announce it for months afterwards, or they might simply let it become common knowledge naturally. Once they were married they could rent rooms anywhere without questions or dirty looks. He’d give her a proper sort of wedding later, with her friends- the more inoffensive, suitable ones, at least- and his- the more tolerant, placid ones, at least. 

She’d handed him the thermos, and he’d taken an eager swig, barely registering the taste, so caught up in his thoughts. It made sense, he told himself. To just have it over and done with. He had more than enough money saved to sign a lease on someplace halfway decent. Nothing very expensive, of course, but not some slum, either. She’d like that. Getting to decorate it. She liked to collect things, like him, and he knew some part of her would delight in haggling over the cheapest curtains for the best quality, or coming home with some impractical rug she’d seen at a flea market, or some gaudy lamp or strange patterned vase. 

They could hang up some of her drawings, he thought. She would like that, seeing something of hers behind a cheap glass frame. And they could argue over how to organize their respective books for days on end. She’d insist on arranging them by genre. He’d maintain that alphabetical by author made the most sense. They’d war over it, very pleasantly. 

“What’s the vintage?” he’d asked. He thinks about being able to have her in a proper bed without concern that they were about to be walked in on or overhead. He thinks about watching her get ready for work in the morning, carefully pursing her lips in the bathroom mirror while she applied her lipstick. He thinks about saying, “My wife, Amy. She’s a healer, you know, one of Parkinson’s. A natural.” He thinks about overhearing her say, “Have you met my husband?” and then calling out his name in her clear, rich voice- “Tom, come say hello!”

“You’re the expert,” she’d said then, smoothing down her trousers, and he should have known, because she would not meet his eyes then, and it was unlike her- usually, afterwards, she would always look at him, like she was trying to memorize his outline in her mind, like she was worried he might vanish while her back was turned.

“Not nearly old enough,” he’d snickered, and handed the thermos over to her. “Who gave you this? Mishra? You could use this for cooking vinegar.”

He hadn’t cared about the taste, though. The wine had meant little and less. Tom’s never been one to linger over a good meal or pause in front of a work of art, thoughtful. He doesn’t have a favorite song or book. All those things, while enjoyable, were ultimately just distractions. They didn’t matter. They wouldn’t last. They didn’t have the staying power that money did, that power did, that trust did. That she did. He enjoyed his time with Amy, had an aesthetic admiration of her. But ultimately she was not something that could simply be taken out, enjoyed, and put away.

It had perplexed him, when he was young. Sometimes she made him so angry he wanted to scream and throw things and hurt her, hurt himself. Why then would he continue to crave her company? If it wasn’t nice and good all the time, why would he want it? It would be like eating something that occasionally made you sick to your stomach. Why risk it? But with her, he always had. Even when he felt he could hate her, even when she was at her very worst, when she was stubborn, when she was spiteful, when she was vindictive, it did not stop his wanting. It never had. 

Tiredly, he’d watched her press the thermos to her lips, as if about to confess a secret, in a girlish sort of manner that was very unlike her. Amy was very rarely coy. She said what she meant, exactly when she meant it, and how she meant it. He knew that by now, had learned his lessons in trying to coax her into placid ignorance. Her honesty demanded honesty, or at the very least, lies with more effort to them. 

“I brewed it myself. Funny the sort of things you pick up in between fetching teas and cloaks for healers.”

Now, remembering, he retches again, producing only spittle. He braces his shaking hands on his knees, then forces himself back up. She’s not here. She’s gone. Tom casts a wild look around the edge of the lake. It’s been hours, but maybe- she wouldn’t have gone back to the castle, she knows that’s where he might look first for her, but the village, if she went down to the village to hide, to plan her next move-

His wand. Where the fuck is his wand? He scrambles through the long grass until he finds it, damp with dew, and picks it up in relief, some of his helpless panic momentarily abating. 

The streets of Hogsmeade are deserted, utterly empty at this early hour, aside from a few shopkeepers beginning to prepare to open for the day. Tom sticks to the backstreets and alleyways, combing methodically through the tiny village. It doesn’t take very long. He casts a desperate glance in the direction of the forest, but she couldn’t have. She wouldn’t have. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, so to speak. 

_What are you doing_ , he thinks, _Amy, what are you doing, why are you doing this_ -

Is this some kind of test? Some last ditch attempt at a moral lesson? Does she just mean to scare him, to threaten him with what could be if he doesn’t get his proverbial act together? She wouldn’t really love. He remembers every word out of her mouth from the night before but he dismisses it all. No. She would never truly leave him. He is furious all the same, that she would ruin something so perfect, even if only for the night, but he can put it aside for now, he’s not an animal. He jogs down to the train station, ignoring how strange it looks in the early light, absent of the gleaming red Hogwarts Express. The man behind the desk has no recollection of any young woman hurrying in to buy a ticket, but there was a portkey departure forty minutes ago, just outside. 

“Where?” Tom rasps.

The attendant frowns at his vehemence. “Across the Channel,” he says reprovingly, as if it ought to be obvious. “Rookie healers, you know. For the Relief Services.”

Tom has seen all the brightly colored propaganda, urging aspiring healers and mediwizards to jumpstart their careers abroad and in the literal field, tending to the wounded and displaced, helping to restore some semblance of order to magical Europe, along with the legions of aurors, hit wizards, potioneers, and cursebreakers dispatched to assist in the clean-up efforts.

He’d never spared it a second thought, has no memory of Amy ever commenting on it or giving it more than a passing glance. But now it seems all too glaring, too obvious. Where else would she have gone, where else could she have gone? She has no family, no resources. She’s eighteen years old; the muggle and magical governments alike bear no further responsibility for her. Her career at Mungo’s was by his design. She hasn’t got the money to afford housing by herself, and the magical community is so small that he could easily track her down anywhere in Britain through word of mouth alone. If this was going to be more than an adventurous lark, a brief spurt of rebellion, she’d have to not just leave-

He stalks back outside-

Not just leave him, but leave Britain entirely.

His heart is beating very fast and very frantically. The portkey has already departed. He could stick his wand out right now, summon the Knight Bus, and make it to Dover within the hour. But then he’d have to find his own way across the Channel. Pay someone off, most likely, to arrange illegal transport for him. Something the Ministry has been cracking down on for the past two years with very successful results. If he’s caught- going over or coming back- that will be it. There will be no wriggling out of that conviction. He can say goodbye to any chance of a political career. He doesn’t have the kind of money or influence- yet, he tells himself, as he always does, not yet- to handwave that sort of thing away.

And the ring. He slumps into a bench outside, panting slightly despite the cool air. She has the bloody ring. 

“ _I’m practical. I don’t want any trouble. I want this to be easy for both of us_.”

He is shaking all over, as if he’d just narrowly avoided death, dodged a swerving car or a runaway horse, nearly toppled from a cliff but righted himself at the last moment. He can find her, he knows he can, at terrible cost to himself. Every instinct in him is screaming to stop questioning and just go. It doesn’t matter. He’ll make it without being caught, he’ll get her back, he’ll take the ring, it doesn’t matter, he just needs to go, he’s already wasted too much time, he’s letting her walk away, she doesn’t just-

She doesn’t just get to walk away into the night as if- as if this were some- that is not what this is. She promised. She swore it would always be the two of them, always, she doesn’t get to leave anymore than he does. He would never do this to her. Never. Even at his angriest, his most ugly, all he’d wanted was to keep her close. He would never treat her like this. Is she blind? How can she be so ignorant? Did she think this would be- that any part of him could ever accept this? She loves him. She told him she loved him. He loves her. You don’t leave someone you love. That’s not how it works. You don’t get to leave them. 

She’d been crying. She hadn’t wanted to go either. She’d cried and apologized and told him she loved him again. His hand moves unconsciously to his right pocket, pulls out the earrings. They feel warm, as if she’d just removed them. His fist clenches shut around them until the metal cuts into his palm. He shoves them back into his pocket. This is wrong. This is all wrong, and she must know it. She has to know how wrong this is, what a mistake she is making. Yes. She does. He comforts himself with the thought, wraps it around his trembling shoulders like a cloak. She was crying to go and she said she loved him, so she must know. She must know. 

She’ll come back. She has always, always come back. Hasn’t she? Tom’s eyes are stinging very badly, but he has not cried in a very long time, because he learned when he was small that crying didn’t do much of anything, no one came, no one ever came, they just hushed you or snapped at you, crying isn’t worth much if there is no one to respond to it. He can’t remember the last time he cried in front of Amy, or if she ever cried in front of him, aside from last night. That must mean she regrets it, that she had doubts even then. She will come back. She has always come back to him, even when she’s been angry and disgusted and afraid of him.

His hands form claws atop his knees, like a posing statue. A rooster crows far off in the distance. He can get through this, he tells himself coldly. He is going to- he will be fine. She will come back. It might be a few weeks, a few months, until the end of the summer, perhaps, but she will come back. He just has to be patient. He needs to show her that he can be patient. He showed her patience before, let her come to him, didn’t press the issue when she was so upset over Abbott. Obviously not enough. This time it will be. If she’s expecting him to throw a tantrum and go tearing after her like a shrieking toddler, she’s wrong.

He can be patient. He can wait for her. This is- it’s just a last ditch rebellion, he tells himself. She just needs to… work it out of her system. He’ll let her have this. He can be the mature one, the adult. If she wants to act like a child, to go off and have one last sulk and tell herself she’s making a difference, congratulate herself on her independence and bravery, that’s fine. That’s alright. He can wait. 

And when she realizes just how big, and sprawling, and decidedly ugly and grotesque the world is, when she tires of counting corpses and marching through husks of towns and villages, when she realizes just how fortunate she was to have been spared the full weight of the war, both wars, she will come running back home with her tail between her legs. To him. She might put up a proud front at first, claim she just needed to prove to herself that she could do it, that she could survive without him, that she doesn’t ‘really’ need him, but eventually that front will cracks, as all hers do, and it will just be the two of them, again.

To calm himself, he thinks of how he might make her pay for this. Nothing too drastic, obviously. He doesn’t want to hurt her. Well, he does, but he won’t. He would never hurt her. But there will have to be consequences, some sort of reprisal, while still assuring her that this is what is for the best. He doesn’t want to push her away yet again by exploding on her when she returns. He’ll play the long game, he decides. Give her a taste of her own medicine. And then, when she’s smugly confident that all is forgiven, that yet again he has let her have her way with nothing more than a ‘yes, Amy’, he will teach her a little lesson. Nothing too severe. But a lesson all the same. 

He’s not the one who is always escalating things, always pushing, testing the limits, seeing how far he can go. That’s her. She claims to hate conflict, but really, he tells himself, she loves it. She loves angering him, loves making him ‘prove’ things to her. Isn’t that why she went for Abbott in the first place? She thinks she’s so clever, she does, but it was blatantly obvious. All those scornful little looks in his direction in between making doe eyes and holding hands. ‘Oh, Matthew, you don’t have to carry my books!’ It made him feel physically ill. He wonders how she ever heaped any affection on that imbecile with a straight face. As if she would ever want that. Someone who didn’t challenge her as much as she challenges him. As if she could be content with some mousy, mundane little life as what, some Hufflepuff’s housewife? 

He’ll teach her a thing or two about being careful what she wishes for, when she comes back. 

He would have never considering doing something like that to her. Rendering her so helpless and vulnerable, poisoning her, using her feelings against her. But if that’s how she’s willing to play, who is he to deny her? Maybe she’ll reconsider her methods when she’s home with him and lying weak and spent in bed, unable to so much as reach for her wand or even speak, feeling that sort of primal terror of being utterly dependent on another person, with your life in their hands. Fair’s fair. She didn’t hurt him, not physically, so he won’t hurt her. He’ll just show her how it feels to be on the receiving end of something like that. 

And she, unlike him, will recover and wake up with someone who loves her by her side, not having run off on her, not having abandoned her. Someone who will never leave her. That’s a kindness, isn’t it, compared to what she’s done to him? He’s always been kinder than necessary, with her, always so careful of her feelings. Even this past year- he didn’t push, did he? There is a brief fluttering of fear. Is he forgetting something? Did something specific precipitate this? Something he did, that he shouldn’t have? 

He shouldn’t have tried to kiss her at Christmas, he knows that now, but he was caught up in the moment, he wasn’t thinking straight. He apologized. He gave her time and more. He’s always apologized to her. He’s always tried to make amends as best he can. He’ll have to remember this. When she comes back, he knows the euphoric relief might overpower his good sense, for a little while, that he might be inclined to let bygones be bygones, to forgive and forget. He can’t. He can forgive her, he could forgive her most anything, he thinks, but he can never forget what she did to him last night. How she used him. Like an object. Like he wasn’t even there. Like he didn’t matter. If she could feel even an eighth of that, she would understand, and never do it again. 

“ _I’m terribly sorry it had to be like this, but you didn’t leave me with much choice_.”

How can she say that? All he has ever done is give her choices, every choice imaginable. That is all he wants for her. A life with so many choices. Where to live, what to purchase, when to eat. Their childhood had none. Nothing was decided by them. Everything was prescribed, everything was regimented, nothing was special. He would have given her so many choices. Isn’t that he promised? That he’d let her decide? He would. He will. She can decide where they live and what they buy for the flat and how they decorate it. 

She can buy herself new clothes and wear whatever she likes. He doesn’t care. She can specialize in whatever sort of healing magic she fancies. She can plan parties and dinners or none at all. She can argue with him every single night until they are both hoarse and red in the face or she can take him to bed with her or she can sit up and read to him or he to her, her head in his lap or she can play music as loudly as she likes until the neighbors complain. She can do all the housework or none of it, that’s what wands are for. She can decide when they have children, and how many, and the names, so long as they’re not too common. 

Really, there is very little he’s not willing to compromise on. Has he bored her? Is that it? He doesn’t have to bore her. He wouldn’t. Once he’s been promoted enough, once he’s making enough money, once their names are out there, no longer tainted by their muggle ties- He can give her everything, and none of it dull in the least. He would take her out to dinner at restaurants they’d never have even heard of as children, he would buy her things she’d only seen in glossy magazines, he would bring her places she’d never dream would accept her without a sneer or whisper. 

Tom doesn’t understand what she thinks she’s running from. He sits there on the platform for a little while longer, as the sun continues to rise, and then slowly stands. He has to shower, change clothes, eat something. He has a graduation ceremony to attend. He has a future to tend to. One of them has to be responsible for a change. 

HOGSMEADE, JULY 1958

As it turns out, “Please don’t wander around Hogsmeade alone, Mae,” had a bit more staying power before the school year officially ended. The term officially ended on June 27th. It’s been two weeks. If Mae didn’t know every nook and cranny of their small cottage before, she certainly does now. For the first two weeks she was simply happy to be done with her homework and exams, and envious of everyone else piling onto the Hogwarts Express for the journey home, ecstatic that their summer was beginning. 

Malcolm bickering with his sister as they loaded their luggage on, Christine in tears because her brother had kicked her out of his compartment in favor of his Gryffindor friends, Marian hugging Valerie, shock of all shocks, and making her promise to write, Valerie looking dumbfounded at this unexpected show of affection, Ambrose leaning out the train window to talk to Mae, the sunlight glinting off his hair, and Mum watching in the background with that pinched sort of look she gets sometimes, almost guilty, as if she was waiting to escort Mae back to her prison cell.

Well, it might as well be. If Hogsmeade was sleepy even during the school year, it’s all but dead in the summer. Half the shops shutter for the season, and the ones that remain open, Mae has been in half a million times. She knows most of the shopkeeps by name at this point, and knows who will let her linger without buying anything for an hour on end, and who will push her out the door, barking at her to ‘go play’. Play what, exactly? Mum says it’s just part of growing up, that Mae doesn’t really want to, well, ‘play’ anymore. She’s twelve. She doesn’t want to kick all ball around the small garden by herself, she doesn’t want to draw with chalk on the front walk, and she certainly does not want to break out some old dolls and sit cross-legged on the floor of her room, giving them different voices and increasingly deranged schemes. 

To compensate for this boredom, Mum has been on the cleaning binge to end all cleaning binges. Every surface has been scrubbed and mopped, every window has been shined, they’ve repainted the front door, put in new flowers in the front and planted a small tree for additional shade in the back, the overgrown hedgerows between their house and the next have all been trimmed down, the cellar has been swept out, the tiny attic has been neatly ordered, swathes of clothes that Mae has begun to outgrow, now that she’s finally started to tick up in height a little, have been donated away, her school things have been packed away in her trunk and her wardrobe, the sheets have all been washed, the rugs shook out. Mae, of course, was pressed into service alongside her mother, and now that they can’t conceivably clean or organize any further, the boredom is back, along with a healthy heaping of resentment.

It’s not that being alone is so difficult for Mae, even if it feels different after having shared a dormitory and common room all year, feels oddly empty to not hear other voices and see familiar faces every day. She used to spend hours alone in Gibraltar. It’s just that there was so much more to do there, more to see. She could walk around the city, explore different neighborhoods, walk down to the beach, ogle at the tourist strips, examine the harbor, beg Mum to take her to the nature preserve. Mae freely flitted between the magical and muggles districts without second thought. Now she’s living in a tiny village in the middle of the Highlands with no major landmarks besides Hogwarts, which is locked up for the summer, the lake, which can only be swum in every so often, because Mum’s paranoid about the Squid, and the forest, which she is forbidden to enter. 

And Mum doesn’t even want her walking around Hogsmeade alone. It’s bloody ridiculous, if you ask Mae. She’s twelve, not a toddler. At this point she doesn’t care if June Carmody and her husband are actual axe-murderers, she’s not going to spend the next month and a half sitting in her stuffy room all day reading. There’s no library here and she doesn’t have endless money to spend on books. Magical radio has a very limited number of stations. If she hears the same Top Ten wizarding pop song, “Let Me Spell it Out” one more time she is going to go berserk. Mum’s been cooped up at the kitchen table for hours on end working on some article, or peer-reviewing someone else’s article, Mae can never remember.

Mae’s not an idiot. She doesn’t think Mum was exaggerating or making things up when she said that Gaunt was dangerous. But he’s off traveling Europe with his retinue, making nice with the other magical leaders. That seems as safe as things are going to get here, for the time being. Besides, Dumbledore is still up at the castle because either his entire family is dead or they all hate him, Mae can’t decide and frankly doesn’t care why he remained when all the other professors went home. Probably so he can scheme with Mum, who sends frequent letters up there, probably because she knows Carmody will make a note of it if she’s seen popping back and forth from the castle constantly.

The point is, it’s utterly unrealistic to expect her to remain cooped up inside all summer, and Mum is delusional if she thinks she can stop her. Mae’s not a child anymore, and she’s not going to be treated like one, she tells herself firmly. She’s not an ickle firstie anymore, either, next year she’ll be a second year, and although it’s not much, it deserves at least an ounce more respect than she got last year. Mostly, she misses her friends. She misses being around people from school, even the ones who are insufferable. She misses the food, no surprise there, and she even misses some of her professors, like Finch and Witherspoon. Mostly, she misses being busy, as loathsome as it sounds. Not the homework, but just the routine. She can never say it aloud, of course, and risk proving Mum right, but it was… not... terrible getting up every day and knowing exactly what to expect. She knows what to expect these days, too. Nothing. Boredom. Complete and absolute isolation. Everyone else on Earth could have dropped dead, some days, and she’s certain Mum wouldn’t have even noticed, they don’t set a foot outside the house. 

So for the past few days she’s been in the habit of leaving before Mum wakes up in the morning. It’s not easy, but Mae supposes she has a nine o’clock Transfiguration class to thank for being able to rouse herself at seven. Mum’s tried to get up even earlier a few times, to catch her in the act, but Mae is confident there is no competing between the energy levels of a twelve year old and a thirty one year old. She can wake up before dawn if she has to, and still not feel tired twelve hours later. Since there’s no opportunity for them to actually have a row about it until Mae comes home, hours later- she’s been in the habit of getting lunch at the Hog’s Head for free because she reminds the old witch who runs it of her granddaughters- most of the time, the row just doesn’t happen beyond some tired scolding from Mum.

Besides, if Mum didn’t want her going out at all, she shouldn’t have let Finch give them an old bike of his for Mae to ride around on. So fair’s fair.

Mae does a full loop of the village, legs pumping the pedals, standing above the seat whenever she coasts gently down a hill. Then she skids down the grassy slope towards the dirt trail around the lake, worn down by hundreds of feet, and puts the pedal to the metal, working her way into a proper speed, sending up a small cloud of dust behind her. A mermaid pops her head up to regard her curiously. Mae pulls a face and keeps pedaling, feeling the wind ripple at her hair, which is free of its headband. She’s stopped wearing them this summer. They’re honestly pretty babyish, in Mae’s opinion, and she hates polka dots now, she’s decided. Really, she doesn’t like a lot of things she used to like. She mops her bangs away from her forehead, thinks about adopting a ponytail instead, like Valerie.

Mum’s recently got some paper announcing the incoming class of 1958, which is apparently Britain’s largest yet in generations, since they were all born directly after the end of the war. One hundred and ninety two of them. Mae’s year was only one hundred and sixty. The seventh years that just graduated two weeks ago, which Mum had to attend, standing out in the unusually sweltering heat by the lake, there were only seventy two of them. That seems insane to Mae. Just seventy two graduating students. But they were all born in 1940, in the middle of the war, when the birth rates were much lower.

Halfway around the lake, her pedaling begins to falter, and she slows down, just coasting along for as long as she can, listening to the birds chirping in the distance. She stops when she reaches a small copse of pretty trees, a forgotten sort of grove, overgrown around the edges but still inviting enough. Mae wades through the tall grass and prickly shrubbery, then sits down on the warm ground. There’s a few leftover cigarette butts, someone’s forgotten sandal, and an old rusted metal thermos half buried in the dirt. But mostly it feels overlooked and peaceful. She sits cross-legged, her hands splayed flat on her thighs. If she closes her eyes and just listens to the lake, maybe she can pretend she’s at the beach. 

That doesn’t really work. Mae opens her eyes again with a groan, and flops onto her back like a fish out of water. A distant shriek of laughter, then a muffled shout. People don’t really shout around Hogsmeade unless one of the many stray cats (or the less-stray-cat, Sal) is rooting in their trash again. Mae pops back up like a weasel, curious, and clambers to her feet, brushing off the grass and dust from her pedal pushers. She squints across the lake, and sees, distantly, on the far side, two figures splashing in the water. Curiosity stoked, Mae clambers back onto her bike and sets off in that direction. Technically, she isn’t speaking to anyone, so Mum can’t complain about this. 

She’s still a bit tired, so her pedaling is much slower, but the figures in the shallows seem in no hurry to leave. Mae slows even more as she gets close enough to hear them, albeit indistinctly, and registers that they aren’t children or even teenagers, but grown adults. She hops off her bike again and walks it briskly a little closer. Professor Carmody and her husband are swimming together. For a few baffled moments she wonders if they’re skinny-dipping, and if they are, should she be revolted or intrigued, but then she sees that Carmody is wearing a patterned green and blue sarong around her hips, knotted off at the side, although it doesn’t match the dark red of her bikini top. Norbrook has just picked her up and tossed her into deeper waters.

Mae watches with a strange, detached sense as Carmody surfaces with a splutter, shouting playfully at him, then splashes him with a very out of character squeal when he rushes her again. It’s sort, of, she thinks, like being warned about a dangerous bear in the woods, and then finding said bear lying in the sunshine gorging itself on blueberries. She knows she shouldn’t be watching them, and just because they’re fooling around in the summer sunshine does not mean they are automatically good people and that this is all just some wild misunderstanding. She heard what Norbrook said. He’s working for the Minister. He’s part of a secret organization, like the villains in a spy film. 

But he also apparently likes to go swimming with his wife on his days off. They’ve even brought in a beach ball. Mae stays where she is, clutching the metal handlebars of her bike, and watches as Carmody floats on her back like an otter, sunglasses firmly in place, staring up at the cloudless blue sky. The water must still be pretty frigid, but neither of them seem bothered in the least. Norbrook joins her after a moment, then dives down, only to pop back up on the other side of her, slightly closer to where Mae is. Mae shies back belatedly, but there’s nowhere much to hide besides the shrubbery, and she sees him spot her. 

He stands there for a moment in the chest deep water, then nudges his wife and waves. Mae stares at them, then lifts her hand in recognition, unsettled. Carmody wades into the shallows, her wrap trailing after her like a mermaid’s tail, the knot loosened by the water. “Benson!” she shouts to Mae. “Having a good summer?” Mae has always liked how Carmody is as willing to address the girls as their surnames as the boys. It’s always annoying when Beery calls Malcolm ‘McGonagall’ but she is just ‘Mae’, as if her last name doesn’t count at all. It feels infant- infant-something, she forgets the word. It means when people treat you like a baby, but you’re not.

“Yes!” she calls back, hating how shy her voice suddenly sounds, high and fragile.

Carmody pulls off her sunglasses, revealing more of her pasty white face. Her red hair is darkened by the water, plastered around her ears. “Say,” she says, “did you hear the bus go by?” She’s out of the water now, standing among the silt and muck.

Mae stops herself from going any closer, although she’s pretty sure the Squid would stop them if they tried to drown her or something. “The Knight Bus?” she asks, her bangs falling into her eyes again. She huffs. They really need to be cut but the last time Mum tried it devolved into another shouting match.

“I think your mother has company,” June says, shading her eyes as she regards Mae, and something about her cool smile sets Mae on edge. Without a second word, she hops on her bike and takes off. Arthur Norbrook calls something after him, but she doesn’t hear him. 

Logically speaking, if someone were here to hurt Mum, they probably would not take the bus, but Mae doesn’t care. Mum would have said something if they were expecting visitors. She pedals pell-mell back into the village, whipping around corners and almost colliding with an old man carrying home his groceries, pants as she crests the top of the lane, then skids over the curb, weaves across the cobblestones, and finally brakes outside the cottage. The gate is ajar, but the front door is shut. 

Mae feels in her back pocket for her wand, then realizes she left it in her desk drawer. Mum’s always after her to take it with her, even if it’s illegal for her to use magic outside of school, ‘just in case’. Mae hasn’t touched it in days; that drawer squeals loudly when you open it, and she hasn’t wanted to risk waking Mum up in the mornings. She swears under her breath, then skulks around the back, because the front curtains are still closed. 

Gravel crunching underfoot, she creeps up onto the back stoop, peering through the back door, but she doesn’t see anyone. Something is scratching at the door, though. After a moment’s hesitation, Mae tries the handle, and it opens, unlocked. Salome shoots out into the garden, throwing her a dirty look. Mae stands there, balanced on the edge of the step, her hand on the doorknob, framed by the morning sunshine. There’s the sound of footfall, and then Mum and another woman come into view. Mae relaxes minutely, then stares and beams when she realizes who it is. 

“No,” says the woman, who has warm brown skin and thick black hair in a voluminous bouffant. “This gorgeous girl can’t possibly be little Mae, can she? Merlin forbid!”

“Aunt Ruby!” Mae forgets weeks of maturity in one fell swoop, dashing into the house like a little girl and all but tackling Ruby with her embrace. Mum is smiling, leaning against the kitchen doorway with her arms folded. “I thought you couldn’t come visit this summer!”

Ruby showers her with kisses, then grips her chin and pushes back her bangs. “Couldn’t isn’t wouldn’t, lovely. I battled it out with the corporate scum, and here I am. Three weeks vacation.”

“The First Magical Bank of New York won’t collapse without you?” Mae wriggles out of her shockingly strong grip, for such a little woman. 

“Only by my decree,” Ruby kisses her again. “There. We’ve caught up on a year’s worth of kisses. And you need a year’s worth of a haircut, ragamuffin.”

“Ruby,” Mum mutters under her breath, but she’s laughing a little. “I’ll get the scissors.”

Mae rocks back on her heels. “Did you bring me something?” She asks, wheedling. 

Ruby arches a dark eyebrow, smoothing her yellow-and-red floral top, which is tucked into a pair of jaunty scarlet red Bermuda shorts. Even her beaded straw bag matches. Mum likes fashion. Ruby breathes and lives it. She opens her bag, procures a small box, and hands it over to Mae with a stage whisper. “Don’t tell your mother until after lunch. We’ll corner her then.”

Mae grins, and pops it open as Mum comes down the stairs, revealing her very first pair of earrings; tiny pearl studs. She snaps it shut while her aunt chuckles, and tucks it into her back pocket the way a man might hide an engagement ring. A year ago she would have been pleased but not altogether bothered one way or another; as far as earrings go, pearls are a little boring, aren't they? If you're going to hang something in your ears, they might as well be dramatic. Now she’s almost defensively looking forward to the piercing, as if it’s proving something, some test of valor or grit. The more she acts like a little girl, the more excuses Mum has to treat her like one. But little girls don’t wear proper jewelry and they don’t style their hair nicely, they wear headbands and bobby socks.

The look she exchanges with Mum is half truce, half challenge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Sorry if this felt like a very slow 'filler' chapter, but I wanted a brief break before we jump back into the action, and this in between zone seemed like a good time to introduce the first of what will probably be several flashbacks. This is the first time in this fic where the flashback is not part of a dream or a memory, it's just taking us straight back in time, unprompted by Tom or Amy. 
> 
> 2\. I wanted to delve into Tom's feelings directly following Amy's departure, and while this could have gone several ways, I felt like it was most meaningful to focus moreso on his abject denial rather than anything else. I think this was the beginning of something like the stages of grief for him, and for Tom it starts with this total failure to really absorb any of the reasons she left, and instead focus on 'oh, she'll be back, this is just a test, she's definitely going to come back once she can't hack the real world'. Amy could not have been more specific in her little speech about why she was leaving him, but we see that this seems to have gone in one ear and out the other with Tom, because if he dwells on it, then he has to actually own up to how his actions have hurt her and others. Instead he decides she is just 'overreacting' and that she will soon return to him once she 'gets it out of her system'. So I think we can see that Tom's feelings on the matter have clearly changed over the years as he's moved from denial to anger. In the direct aftermath of her leaving, he still reassures himself that Amy loves him and will quickly regret her decision and come back.
> 
> 3\. We then cut to Mae. I mostly wanted to just show how Mae has matured (or thinks she has matured) over the course of the past year. She's growing up and no longer has the same interests and hobbies that she used to. While she doesn't mind being alone, she misses school and the company of her friends and classmates. She's beginning to become defensive at the idea of being thought of as a 'little girl' and she's in the middle of puberty. She and Amy may have been a bit more open with one another, but they are still not on the warmest terms. Mae resents feeling so cooped up and isolated, which is causing her to rebel a bit, and she is still immature enough that she only belatedly realizes that it might be not ideal for her to be sneaking out without her wand, even if she's not going very far. 
> 
> 4\. Carmody and Norbrook are... enjoying their summer holiday? But it is also clear that June is still keeping tabs on Amy, and Mae is torn between wanting to be confrontational and using her good sense and keeping her head down. Ruby is also back in Britain for a little while, after having spent much of her adult career working in the US at one of their magical banks. (Don't mind me while I toss out the entire HP 'expanded canon' regarding the American magical community. It won't come up much in this fic, but it is not accurate to the Fantastic Beasts films... because I don't want it to be.) Tom is abroad at present, playing nice with the other European magical leaders. Matthew and Jaime are possibly being roped into a magical heist at a casino. Just kidding. Or am I? And irony of all ironies, Mae is gifted a pair of, what else, pearl earrings to represent her move towards young adulthood. 
> 
> 5\. As always, you can find me on my blog at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/) if you want to ask me questions, send prompts, or discuss this fic.


	24. Lydia IV - Mae IX

PARIS, AUGUST 1958

Anne-Marie’s evening dress is truly insipid, Lydia thinks, but it was also very simple in design, which means her fabric charms should have some hope of holding up long enough to pass this dress off as the original. That is always the difficult part, the clothing. People tend to remember what one another are wearing at events like this, especially other women. 

The hair was not very difficult; Anne-Marie wears hers in a simple soft brown bob, so as not to distract from her heavy eyeshadow and lipstick. Lydia had thought the French generally preferred a more fresh-faced look, but she supposes no people are a monolith. The shoes are not the same, but if she remains standing she doubts anyone will notice that the black heels on her stockinged feet are slightly different in style. 

The French magical government moved into the catacombs around the time of the Revolution, but they have done an impressive job of pretending otherwise; every room is full of enchanted windows spilling in artificial light. Right now it is starlight, although the stars are very, very far away from them at present, and the lamps have been burnished until they gleam, and the thick carpets have been charmed to change color with every step, so one can see a rainbow of footprints crisscrossing here and there, looping all around the private lounge. 

On the floor above them, the French Minister for Magic, Claude Solomon, is hosting an elaborate ball for foreign dignitaries to celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of Paris’ liberation from Grindelwald’s forces. Tom is likely dancing with her; the media is obsessed with the darling pair they make; the slightly androgynous Solomon, her hair cut boyishly short, her robes elaborately tailored to sleekly highlight her willowy frame, and the classically handsome Gaunt, favoring a muggle tuxedo to illustrate to the increasingly liberal and halfblooded French that he is committed to more than just the rights of purebloods. 

The joke usually goes that the worst of French’s purebloods absconded to England during the Norman conquest. In reality, they are still shame-faced over how frightfully popular Grindelwald became during the 20s and 30s. For Merlin’s sake, they still blithely refer to muggleborns as ‘sans charme’ in their papers. Solomon may preen about how enlightened her new government is all she likes. They were still stamping out pockets of resistance up until three years ago. And Lydia has had quite enough of her scornful looks; ‘Et voici votre jeune mariée? Cela doit être si écrasant!’ 

Lydia Gaunt, nee Rosier, speaks only passable French, understands even less, and can do no more than blush shyly and nod. 

Anne-Marie Villon is a Paris native and does not hesitate to greet the bouncer outside the staffers’ lounge with a smile and a wave, toasting her cocktail to him. “Laisse-moi entrer du froid, Georges!” she jokes. She knows his name because the nearest ladies’ lavatory also happens to be located just around the corner, and it didn’t take long to hear him chatting away with colleagues, joking about the English delegation and their stiff demeanours. 

Georges lets her through with a smile and a nod, and Anne-Marie, or the woman in Anne-Marie’s skin, slips inside the room the staffers have been referring to as ‘le glacier’ all evening. Spartanly decorated and lacking half of the glamours and charms placed on the more public rooms, there is a notable drop in temperature, raising the hairs on Anne-Marie’s bare arms. Lydia glances down at those slender arms, wondering if she missed a memorable mole or freckle that might arouse suspicion. She doesn’t think so. 

She supposes she should be more nervous. She doesn’t actually know any of these people, she’s never been in this place before, and she is masquerading as a woman who could potentially arrive at some point to find her doppelganger present. But Lydia very much doubts that’s going to happen. Anne-Marie is presently very busy tending to an ill Lydia Gaunt, laid up in her hotel room with a horrendous migraine. She’s likely scouring the city for apothecaries that would still be open this late. Besides, Lydia would be lying if she didn’t enjoy the thrill at least a little bit. The tension of possibly being caught out is what will keep her on her toes. Tom and her agreed on that much, at least. 

And really, this is so much more enjoyable than playing the part of the Minister’s arm candy. Lydia won’t pretend she isn’t still angry with him. But that pales in comparison to what she feels towards her family. Her scars prickle; she can always feel them, whether or not they can be seen. When she was younger she used to scratch them open in her sleep, they itched so badly, peeling skin. It reached the point where Mother began to insist she wear gloves to bed. Lydia got over it, of course, as she has gotten over everything. Aunt Tess says she is supremely adaptable; a metamorphmagus’ dream. It doesn’t matter what your body is capable of it if you can’t mentally endure it. It’s like walking over hot coals. Mind over matter. 

Supremely adaptable. Lydia takes her time, scans the room, the clumps of exhausted attaches and secretaries and administrators, some having slackened their ties or slipped off their robes or abandoned their shoes. There’s no live music here, unlike the small orchestra in the ballroom, but someone has piped in crackling jazz. Anne-Marie approaches the bar slowly but confidently, orders a refill, testing the inflection of her voice, her accent, and then catches another witch’s eye. The blonde woman waves her over distractedly; Lydia thinks they must know each other, but are perhaps not very close friends. That’s better, really. 

She braces herself as she enters the conversation; her French is fluent but she’s not used to being surrounded by other speakers, and they’re all talking quite fast and animated, a few of them visibly tipsy and giggly; office gossip at its finest. Lucky for her then that Anne-Marie is shy and reticent, the sort who doesn’t think anyone much cares what she has to say, least of all her superior, the undersecretary to the Minister, Jacques Lyon. 

Fortunately, this is not the sort of gathering the undersecretary can afford to slip off too, not when he needs to closely supervise his bold young ministress. Claude Solomon gets increasingly blunt the more she drinks and Lydia would not be surprised if she and Tom were verbally sparring- in English, his written French is quite good, but his spoken is terrible. It might be enjoyable to witness if not for the fact that she’d then have to hear an entire rundown of the conversation later tonight. Tom is incapable of not scrutinizing every interaction in that manner. It will be even worse if they have to quibble over potential translation errors on Solomon’s part. Lydia doesn’t feel like whipping out the French to English dictionary and having a rousing linguistics debate.

The blonde woman’s name is Juliette, and she is engaged in a rousing debate herself; with Edmonde, Henry, and Maurice. Admittedly, it takes Lydia several minutes as Anne-Marie to begin to keep them straight and decipher their various lines of argument, but luckily she has some idea of what they’re arguing about before Juliette turns to her and demands to know what she thinks of Gaunt- surely she’s gotten closer to him than the rest of them, working directly under Lyon and Solomon. 

“ _He’s an arrogant bastard_ ,” she says without pause, then flushes, because Anne-Marie would only say something like that while a little tipsy herself. 

They burst into raucous laughter, eagerly turning to hear more. Lydia feels a familiar surge of excitement. She doesn’t know how else to describe it, almost a light-headed sort of sensation she gets, when looking down at a body that should be hers but is so clearly not. A lack of responsibility, really. She feels like she could say anything, do anything, be anyone. Be anyone but herself. Even if it is just mousy little Anne-Marie Villon, secretary to the undersecretary, in her faded cocktail dress.

“ _The wife is very beautiful_ ,” Maurice says. “ _Young, too- the both of them! And we thought that Solomon was a babe in arms_!”

“ _He is young and successful so he thinks he knows best_ ,” Edmonde contends, adjusting her cat-eye glasses. “ _This talk of limiting all travel across the Channel… it’s nonsense. He is going to hamper trade and industry for the sake of his precious isles? It’s typical. They were cowards during wartimes, and they are even more cravenly during peacetimes._ ” 

Henry holds up a hand. “ _I cannot blame him for wanting to limit the chances of radicals moving in. That is how Grindelwald’s movement started. A slow rot in the roots._ ”

“ _He is blatantly self-serving_ ,” Anne-Marie comments. “ _He has no qualms about putting his own people first_.” She pauses. “ _So long as they are behind him_.”

Maurice guffaws. 

“ _I will say_ ,” Juliette says, “ _that I agree with the Statute amendments he is proposing, and so does Solomon- even if she will not admit it now! They hampered us so during the wars, this bureaucratic shit, all these loopholes and bylaws- how many court cases were there, of some poor witch or wizard held up on charges of muggle endangerment? Meanwhile Grindelwald set sorceresses rampaging through city blocks and the Nazis shot people in the streets. If it happened again_ -,”

“ _It will never happen again_ ,” Edmonde says shortly. “ _Never. No more. Did you not hear the speech they gave in Madrid, last week? It is our duty to police these muggles, if they cannot police themselves. They are like rabid animals. Every decade, a new atrocity. And now they think themselves invincible, with their planes and their weaponry- can you imagine? There is no shield charm for an atom bomb. And still we dither about whether we interfere too much in their lives_.”

Juliette swallows the last of her martini, swishes the olive around in the glass thoughtfully, then switches briefly to English. “We are what we always were in Salem, but now the crazy little children are jangling the keys to the kingdom,” she intones dryly, “and common vengeance writes the law.”

Lydia does not recognize the quote, Anne-Marie certainly would not, and the others look similarly puzzled. 

“Arthur Miller,” says Juliette, wrinkling her nose slightly at the English pronunciation of ‘Arthur’. “ _The Crucible. They assigned it in one of my brother’s university courses. He is a muggle, you know._ ” She stands up with a groan. “ _It is freezing in here. I’m off to fetch my cloak. Anne-Marie, are you coming? Lyon will have your head if he finds you down here when you should be tending to the little trophy wife_ ,” she laughs. 

Anne-Marie obediently follows her out, then says her goodbyes in the slightly warmer torch-lit corridor. 

“ _Chin up_ ,” Juliette assures her. “ _You work hard, you’re sure to be promoted by the new year. At least you won’t have to listen to that shit they call music up there_ ,” she gestures towards the low limestone ceiling, and the faint strains of violin distantly audible, albeit muffled by the stonework all around them. “ _And don’t listen to Edmonde. We are not so different from the rabid animals, as she likes to call them, although we pat ourselves on the back for carrying carved sticks_.”

Anne-Marie smiles and nods, then melts into the shadows. 

Their lavish hotel suite is said to be a direct copy of Marie Antoinette’s rooms at Versailles. Lydia has been to Versailles before, and thinks the fashion incredibly gaudy and distasteful. She is no stranger to opulence, but the gold mirror and gilded furniture is absurd, and the wood-paneled bathroom makes her feel like she’s on display, hanging in a museum herself. She is soaking in said bathtub, easily large enough to hold three of her, back to Lydia’s creamy pale skin and strawberry blonde locks, when she hears Tom enter, speaking quietly with the real Anne-Marie, who is incredibly apologetic about how long it took her to find a painkiller potion at this late hour. Tom is ever the understanding gentleman, of course, and orders one of the hit wizards providing their security to make sure she gets home safely. Lydia kicks up her feet on the opposite end of the circular bath, and watches the hazy purple flames flickering in the marble hearth just a few feet away. 

She can hear Tom taking off his coat and hat, and waits patiently for him to come in. She imagines the hit wizards on duty outside imagine this is something like a second honeymoon for them. Their first was utterly uneventful. She watched the birds. He disappeared for long hours every night, and studied her intently over breakfast, his latest pet project; Lydia and her ever-changing skins. They still have not consummated it. She finds she does not mind. He’s taken to wearing a new ring, a family ring, alongside his wedding band. If it was a gift, he hasn’t mentioned from who. 

The door creaks open, and he steps inside the bathroom, blinking from the steam rising from the tub. Lydia prefers her baths scalding, as a rule. The scars down the side of her face, neck, and arm throb under the skin. She takes some sort of perverse pleasure in letting the peaches and cream melt away, revealing flesh mottled by the heat and lank brown hair. He notices some water she’s splashed onto the floor and immediately lays down a towel.

That is one of the many curious things about this new Tom, her husband, who she is learning to decipher all over again. At the oddest times his upbringing skulks out. If they are home alone and there are dirty dishes in the sink, he will do them rather than let them sit until they can get a cleaner in. He still prefers to pour his own drinks. He is positively utilitarian about the lights and heating. He recently took some shoes to the cobbler rather than simply purchase new ones. There is something of a gritty little spendthrift who spent his childhood mopping floors and rationing food, lurking behind the shiny veneer. 

“Well,” he says, “how was your evening?”

“Anne-Marie thinks you’re an arrogant bastard,” she confides in him, wringing out her wet hair. “The cabinet’s staffers think Solomon will support your Statute amendments over here as well. Pursue similar policies, eventually. She will just be slow about it. Can’t be seen to be head over heels for you.” She stands up; the tub is deep enough that the water still comes up to her hips. 

“Open a window,” he says, moving past her to fling them open himself; his shirt collar is plastered to his throat from the humidity of the room. “And do I detect a note of jealousy?”

“Now what would I have to be jealous over?” she asks with mock horror. “I’m the luckiest woman in the world.” 

He picks up her bathrobe. Lydia holds out a hand expectantly, but he gestures for her to get out instead, and in an uncharacteristically thoughtful movement, bundles her in it himself, the linen ruffling her wet hair. “Thank you,” he says, “you were incredible tonight. They truly didn’t suspect a thing?”

Lydia isn’t immune to flattery, and the bath has improved her mood, for all that she still plays the shrewish wife on occasion with him. She feels it important to set a precedent. He cannot just toy with her and then have his cake and eat it too. Besides, childish as it sounds, she is still holding a grudge over his ban on house elves. She misses Kit very much. The rest of her childhood home… well, it could burn tomorrow and she would make sure she arrived in time to see the fires die out. 

“Of course not,” she says. “People believe what they want. What is easiest for them. And my French is impeccable.”

He takes her hot hand in his own; it’s a warm night in Paris, but his skin is still cool from the catacombs. “We should have a free day tomorrow. Wherever you want to go, I’ll not complain.”

“The botanical gardens,” she decides, adjusting the belt of the robe, and wringing out her hair once more, the brown already lightening and thickening to damp waves. 

“Not shopping?” he asks lightly; his evening must have gone well too, for he’s in a very good mood tonight. 

“Is that all you think I care about?” she asks, pushing open the door leading into one of the ornate bedrooms. “Shopping and gossip and new clothes? Sometimes I think you’ve a low opinion of women.”

“Sometimes I think you’ve a low opinion of me.” But his tone is still so genial, wafting behind her as he follows her out, the steam dissipating after them. “You forgot to turn off the water.”

“Oh dear,” she mutters, as she clambers onto one of the satin-covered beds. “Whatever shall we do?”

He goes back in and turns it off for her. “I hope you know,” Tom says, “that what we’re accomplishing has meaning. Has value. I’m not just saying this to patronize you. You’re important to me, Lydia. What you do is important.”

She regards him lazily as she peruses the room service menu. “I know I’m important to you. You take good care of things that are important to you,” she nods to her gleaming leather shoes.

He looks down, and slips them off. “Perhaps,” he says slowly, “I was too hasty in my judgement. When we return to London, I think you might… you might write home and ask after Kit. Just for the weekends, to have around the house. You’ve not been out much since the wedding, and I think you could use the company.”

Lydia has not been out much because everyone has rightfully assumed she must be in paradise, finally married to her stunningly attractive, successful husband, traveling the world, settling into a well-appointed townhouse. That, and she is fairly certain half of them suspect she is already pregnant, but no such chance of that. Although she likes the idea of leading them on a little. Perhaps she’ll refuse drinks at the next family dinner. Really set them alight. Especially Lyle, whose lackluster attempts to impregnate Cecily a second time have not gone unnoticed. 

“If you think that’s wise,” she says, noncommittal, unwilling to give him any further power over her emotions. He has enough power over the rest of her. 

He sits down on the edge of the bed. “And,” Tom says, oh so delicately, “I do remember your talk of a special focus, you know, a committee you might head, as my wife. Education, wasn’t it? I wrote to the Board of Governors before I left, and they’re very amenable to the idea of you taking a tour of Hogwarts come autumn. So we can begin to identify any… problem areas.” He smiles, looking genuinely pleased with himself. “You’re a perfect fit for it. We wouldn’t want them getting too overwhelmed with a visit from the Minister himself.”

That does surprise her. Lydia had assumed it was all talk on his part, designed to convince her she might have any role at all in politics, before he assigned her some meaningless little role in collecting money for sickly orphans or injured unicorns. She sits up a little, shifting against the plush silk pillows at her back. “Do you mean it?” Her voice sounds too young, she decides, almost raw. 

“Of course,” Tom stands up from the bed, undoing his cravat. “I’m a man of my word, aren’t I?”

CORNWALL, AUGUST 1958

Mae is certain she can ride this wave back to shore- well, that is to say, let it carry her back to shore since she doesn’t have a board or anything to ride on- right up until it all but snatches her up, sends her spinning head over heels, and deposits her in the shallows with a painful grunt. She feels it eddy back across her bare legs, and remains there, all but face down in the cold sand, as the next wave crashes over her back. All she can think is that at least she’s wearing a plain one piece. 

“You look like a beached whale,” says Isaac, who’s become a real little shit since turning eight. Mae’s hand shoots out like Frankenstein’s monster waking up, grabs him securely by the ankle, and flips him onto the ground as she rolls over, snarling. “You’re hurting me,” he wails, but the adults are busy doing adult things- namely day drinking, reading trashy novels, and building a sandcastle with little Joel, so there’s no immediate rescue coming. 

Mae dumps some wet sand and clumps of seaweed in Isaac’s curls, then releases him. He army crawls away pathetically, gasping for breath like he’s in a war movie. 

She clambers to her feet just in time to avoid another freezing wave. As it turns out, the Mediterranean Sea and the Celtic Sea have two drastically different temperatures during the summer months. Mae would like to think she’s not bothered by a bit of cold water after a year of schooling in the highlands, but in reality she’s shivering like a leaf and desperate for her sun-warmed towel, which she wraps around her knobby shoulders, scraping her wet hair away from her face. 

It’s Ruby’s last week here and Mum finally removed the stick from her arse and agreed that they could, in fact, scrape up enough money to afford five days in Cornwall at the seashore. Mae is distantly aware that Mum used to come here as a little girl with the orphanage, but that seems increasingly difficult to imagine. A lot of things she used to think about her mother seem increasingly difficult to imagine. Mae surveys her from a distance now, totally invested in the structure of Joel’s sand palace, digging a moat with a plastic spade. Auntie V is reading one of her mystery novels, and Uncle Danny is consoling Isaac, now sitting in his lap like a baby, not a big, strong, eight year old.

Aunt Ruby is flagging her down now and shoving a sandwich into her hands. “Too skinny,” she says, pinching Mae’s hip, much to her annoyance. “You need to fatten up before school, my dear. You eat like a bird.”

Mae rolls her eyes and sits down on the cooler, unwrapping the foil. “I don’t like tuna.”

“You will,” Mum says, without looking up from her moat. She’s always been like this, ready to blow a gasket if Mae didn’t finish her plate. Mae knows it’s because of the rationing and no one having any money to waste food, but they’re not exactly living in war times at present, are they? She takes a tentative bite of the tuna sandwich, and finds a twig and a dead leaf to make a flag for one of Joel’s towers. 

“You must be excited to go back to school in a few weeks, hm?” Vera asks without looking up from her book. “Second and third years are always the most fun. You get to try new things, you don’t have to worry about your OWLs yet, you can try out for Quidditch-,”

“Unfortunately,” Mum says dryly, “Mae prefers to keep her feet on the ground.”

“I can fly,” Mae says defensively, although she hopes Mum is not about to bring up the actual mark she got for Flying this year, which, while a passing score, was not exactly something to be proud of. To be fair, most of her marks were mixed, which Mum says has less to do with her talent as a witch and more to do with the amount of effort she puts into her class. Mae doesn’t know why she has to nag about it. She did fine in Potions, and Defence Against the Dark Arts, the classes Mum should be the most concerned about.

“I was never a good flyer myself,” Auntie V says, completely missing the point, but Mae feels like adults are always doing that with her these days. Ignoring what they don’t want to hear. Aunt Ruby is a little better than the rest of them, maybe because she doesn’t have any children of her own, and while she can be annoying too, she rarely comes across as patronizing or condescending. 

“Good on you for abstaining,” Ruby says, “it’s a wonderful sport but it’s ludicrous that they let twelve year olds play. No wonder we have so many dullards in government, they all have undiagnosed brain damage from years of concussions.”

“I think I’ll join Dueling Club,” Mae says instead, in between picking at her sandwich and casting furtive glances at Mum. She’s quickly dried off from the warmth of the afternoon sun, and she lets her towel slip down around her waist. 

Mum stiffens minutely, but says nothing, instead adjusting her sunglasses, another gift from Aunt Ruby- she loves giving gifts, Mum says it’s her way of showing affection, on top of all the hugging and kissing- and keeping mum. 

“A martial artist,” Ruby says approvingly. “That’s good. Girls should know how to defend themselves these days. Don’t take any nonsense from these little cretins they call boys. No offence, Joel,” she leans down and ruffles Joel’s hair. Isaac has abandoned Danny’s lap for the waves once more. 

“Who’s teaching it?” Vera asks. “The Defence professor?”

Mae nods, chewing so she doesn’t have to answer. Mum is crafting a bridge for the moat. 

“Come on,” Danny says, gesturing for Mae to get up so he can get another drink from the cooler. “Tell us about the American boyfriend, Ruby.”

Mae can think of very few thing she’s less interested in hearing about than her aunt’s love life, so she scrunches up the tin foil in her hand and wanders off in search of a rubbish bin. The good thing about being on holiday, she thinks, is that it forces Mum to act normally. Mae’s not sure how much Vera and Ruby know; they must know Mum’s connection to the Minister, and they must know why she came back, but she doesn’t think Mum’s told them about other things, like Dumbledore and Carmody or the wedding. Which is good, she supposes. If Mum has to still pretend things are somewhat normal, than maybe they will feel somewhat normal. 

Besides, it is nice having the company around, and Mae likes listening to the waves while she goes to sleep every night. Even if Joel and Isaac are annoying and the adults still treat her like a little kid. She refuses to admit that she is a little happy to be going back to school soon, though. Mum expects her to act like- Mae doesn’t know what, some miniature soldier who’s going to slather on some warpaint and skulk around the castle when they return, ready for anything. Mae doesn’t plan on that. What she does plan on is joining Dueling Club, because even if Carmody is up to no good, she was still a professional duelist for years, and know thy enemy, right? Besides, about the most intimidating spell Mae knows right is a knock-back jinx, which isn’t all that helpful in life or death situations, if you ask her. She’s not a little kid anymore and maybe Mum won’t be so paranoid about keeping her safe if she can actually defend herself.

The weather turns cooler and rainy later in the afternoon, and they go back to the small inn they’re renting rooms at. It’s not right on the beach, but it’s close enough that you can still smell the sea, and it has a big garden with shuttlecock set up, something the Hirsch boys take very seriously. Mae keeps score for them while reading a paperback science fiction book she got from the bargain bin of a shop. It’s not very good but it has loads of gore, and Mae maintains that summer is the best time to ready scary stories, because the days are the longest and the nights are the shortest. Besides, there’s something a little frightening about the heat and the dull buzz of insects and rattle of old fans. 

Eventually, Isaac starts hollering for her to take over from Joel, who missed the shuttlecock too many times and has broken down into tears. 

“Hey,” Mae says, patting him on the head, “hey, Jojo, let’s play cowboys, okay?” Isaac is going through a major cowboy phase. He even has the little red boots to match, and he wears them everywhere, even in the middle of summer. He clambers onto her back so they can hunt down the notorious outlaw known as Jittery Joel Hirsch through the hedgerows, complete with a plastic water gun battle. Mae gets gravel stuck in her knees from covering Isaac while he ambushes Joel, but doesn’t mind picking it out later while mopping off her sweaty face with the oversize blouse she’s wearing as a swimsuit cover. 

Vera and Danny are having a ‘couple’s night’, which apparently means they’re going out to dinner at some fancy restaurant and leaving Joel and Isaac with Ruby, Amy, and Mae. Mae slurps her clam chowder in the dining room, watching Mum try to talk Joel into finishing his vegetables, while Isaac scribbles on some napkins with the crayons Ruby brought for him. 

“Love, you’ve got sunburn all across your nose and cheeks,” Mum says after she’s browbeaten Joel into at least trying a little more of his asparagus. 

Mae crinkles her nose, prodding at the flush of heat on her face. “Shit.”

“Mae,” Mum hisses under her breath, as Ruby laughs; the table across from them, an older couple, glances over in irritation. 

“Sorry,” says Mae. “I meant, gee whiz, that’s a bummer.”

Isaac grins through his green mouthful of asparagus. Mae stops smirking. “That’s disgusting,” she informs him.

“You pick your nose,” he shoots back.

“No, I don’t.”

“You do too.”

“That’s called projection,” Mae says. “I read about in a study. You’re projecting your habits onto me-,”

“If we could get through a meal without you referencing a study you read in an academic journal,” Mum says, “I would appreciate it.”

“Then stop subscribing to them,” Mae retorts. “Besides, I’m a Ravenclaw now, it’s what I’m supposed to do, cite evidence-,”

“Look,” Ruby says swiftly, “the dessert menus are right here, what do we want to order?”

To Mum’s credit, she doesn’t argue when Mae orders an obscenely large sundae with practically every topping on it, and when Ruby wants them to take a picture after dinner in front of the inn’s old staircase, she looks around a little and then lets Mae hop up on the polished bannister for the photo. Then freaks out when Mae pretends to topple backwards off it after the camera’s stopped clicking. 

Mae’s been determined to stay up until at least midnight every night, but after spending hours swimming and running around with the boys, she’s more tired than she is willing to admit. She takes a shower and lounges on the pullout bed while watching Mum and Ruby try to wrangle the boys into their pyjamas. Finally, after Ruby’s run through three bedtime stories and Mum has switched out the pillows twice, Isaac and Joel are down for the count, snoring quietly. Aunt Ruby slips out, and Mum lingers near Mae’s bed. 

“Does your sunburn bother you?” she asks quietly, as Mae turns off her torchlight. 

“No,” Mae lies, even though it burns and itches now, and it’s on her neck and shoulders too. She can hear the waves crashing against the cliffs in the distance, a dull, comforting roar. 

Mum pauses like she wants to say something else, then just kisses Mae goodnight. Mae rolls over so she’s facing the windows, and tries to go to sleep. 

After a good two hours of dozing on and off, she sits up in bed, uncomfortable. Her skin feels too tight across her shoulders and her nose is itching and hurting horribly. Silently, leery of waking the boys, she gets up and pads barefoot across the creaky floors to the door that connects their room to the one the adults are sharing. Mae slowly pushes it open, and takes in the fact that Auntie V and Uncle Danny are back from their night out together, asleep in bed, but Mum and Ruby aren’t there. She inches over to Mum’s bag, lying on the floor, and rifles through it until she finds the bottle of aloe vera lotion. Slathering that across her face and shoulders, she shoves it back in the bag, then strains to listen to the distant voices she hears coming from outside. Peering out the window of the hotel room, she can make out Mum and Ruby sharing a cigarette on the patio below, watching the clouds roll in across the moon.

Mae knows she should go back to bed, and for once there is no thrill of glee or excitement at listening in on someone else’s conversation. She starts to silently back away, to go back into her room and sleep, but then Uncle Danny mumbles in his sleep and gets up, half-awake, to use the bathroom. Mae drops down into a crouch, narrowly avoiding being seen by the moonlight coming in through the window. She doesn’t want him and Vera to think she’s a little creep spying on them while they sleep or something. 

Ruby’s voice, louder than Mum’s wafts up towards her. 

“I think you’re being selfish,” she says, albeit sympathetically.

Mum makes a disgruntled noise in reply. Mae is offended on her behalf; Mum is the most unselfish person she knows. She scoots closer to the open window, the curtains ruffling her damp hair. 

“You have to,” Ruby lowers her voice so it’s barely above a murmur, but it’s still audible from here. “I know it’s- it’s the last thing you want to do, but you’ve got to tell her. Better it come from you than someone else.”

Mae doesn’t need to puzzle out who ‘her’ is.

“Now’s not the time,” Mum says. “She’s- we’ve been having a rough go of it since school ended, I don’t- I don’t know how to talk to her anymore. You know? I never thought I’d think the early years were easy, but I just- I don’t know. Sometimes I think I am just… the opposite of what she needs right now.”

Mae feels a stab of guilt in her chest. She doesn’t mean to ice Mum out, not really, she just- she doesn’t know what to say to her sometimes, either.

The toilet flushes, almost drowning out what is said next.

“Don’t say that,” Ruby says. “You have done a damn good job raising a very clever, very brave little girl, who is not afraid in the least of what anyone thinks of her. You gave up your childhood so she could have one. That is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“No,” says Mum. “But the rest of it is. Something to be ashamed of. I- do you know the chain she always wears?”

A long pause. “She thinks it’s his?” Ruby finally utters. 

More silence. 

“Amy,” Ruby says in something like tired exasperation. “You don’t like to it make it easy on yourself, do you?” 

Danny clambers back into bed with a yawn. Mae doesn’t hear anymore of their conversation because her ears are ringing badly. She massages the dog tags around her neck with two fingers, trying to calm herself down, but they feel hot to the touch. Finally, she manages to sneak out of the room and back into her own, and crawl into bed, blinking back hot tears. If they’re not his, whose are they? If she’s not- if he’s not hers, who is?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. I wasn't terribly thrilled with myself while writing this chapter, mostly because both Lydia and Mae are in sort of weird head spaces at the moment when they're very suspicious and uncertain of the people they should be closest to. But ultimately I think it turned out okay and I wanted to show off Lydia's meta talents being actually used for some subterfuge, and Mae getting a trip to the seashore.
> 
> 2\. Lydia's meta powers are not totally infallible and pulling off this ruse is still a pretty big risk, which I think is why she and Tom do not dare have her impersonate anyone truly notable important, instead picking sort of no-name staffer who doesn't have any power and who would be pretty easy to discredit. This scheme also hinges on Lydia knowing way more French than she lets on, and being quick-thinking enough to just plunge into a foreign setting and conversation and manage to not immediately draw suspicion or raise eyebrows with her behavior. We'll explore more about how she's 'practiced' for this in future chapters.
> 
> 3\. I'm not French, I feel kind of silly trying to create a believable French magical government when I know very little about the actual French government, so I'm going to try to avoid taking too many creative liberties, etc. Every piece of dialogue in italics in this chapter is in French because I did not want it to be a slog to get through for both French and non-French speakers. 
> 
> 4\. Lydia thinks the French ministry is hypocritical because while they claim to be proud that their community is quickly becoming mostly halfbloods, they are also extremely sneering and dismissive of muggles, which is not all that different from the British ministry. 'Sans charme' is just my idea of a pun, in that the magical papers are calling muggles 'charmless' as in awkward and unpleasant, but also literally charmless as in... they can't do magic. 
> 
> 5\. When Lydia is impersonating someone she tends to refer to herself by their name. Sorry if this was confusing during the narrative. It's part of her mental process in assuming another person's identity, so she doesn't trip up in the middle of a conversation or action. Sort of like a method actor, I suppose.
> 
> 6\. Tom is playing nice because Lydia has been giving him the cold shoulder in private since their awful honeymoon. I think we all can guess his ulterior motives for having her plan a trip to Hogwarts with the Board of Governors. 
> 
> 7\. I know eavesdropping has become something of a recurring trope in this fic but I swear it's for a good cause. In Mae's defense, this time she wasn't even really trying to listen in on Amy and Ruby's conversation! While it's not precisely clear to Mae what Amy and Ruby meant when they said 'she thinks the dogtags are his', it's become pretty obvious to her now that either A. these are actually not F.W. Shelby's tags or B. these are not her father's tags, meaning this random muggle soldier, Shelby, is not her father. Maybe not the most dramatic of reveals but it obviously still causes Mae great upset, since she's been so attached to this vague concept of her father as a heroic person who died tragically.
> 
> 8\. You can find me on my blog at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	25. Matthew II

MADRID, MAY 1958

Water is falling or splashing in the next room. Matthew sits bolt upright on the stained mattress, then winces when he braces his hand on a broken spring. It’s not a faucet running, because this flat doesn’t have running water. In fact, this flat doesn’t have much of anything, save some broken, dust-covered furniture, a few rats, a tiny rusting fire escape that could safely hold maybe a gerbil or two, and a battered front door so heavily covered in wards that it reeks of pig blood day and night. 

Isola’s been to the nearest butcher’s twice already to update his warding spells, and while Matthew got over the rather nauseating site of him carving up a pig carcass for whatever dark rites he’s inlaid into the door… Suffice to say, this might be a safe house, but it’s not a very comforting one. 

Still, he’s alive, which he supposes is something. He’d expected Jaime Isola to pretty quickly either kill him, or obliviate and stun him and leave him for dead in some gutter within hours of their… escape. Matthew doesn’t even like thinking of it in those terms. It was Jaime’s escape, not his. He’s an unwilling passenger- how can he even be regarded as an accomplice, if he doesn’t have a wand. A hostage, if you want to get technical. Against what, he’s not sure. Matthew had expected them to both be tracked down by more hit wizards within hours. But whatever trail they’d left must have gone cold. Then he’d tried to overpower Isola in the direct aftermath of the fire.

The first time he’d almost convinced himself it would be over very quickly. Jaime Isola is five feet, nine inches, and probably weighs less than one hundred and fifty pounds from the stress and exhaustion of being on the run. Matthew is around the same height and has a good twenty pounds of muscle on him. All he had to do was catch him off guard and ambush him in close enough quarters that the wand wouldn’t make a distance. All aurors were trained in hand to hand combat; Pike thought it was ludicrous to expect that they might never be disarmed or caught without their wands by criminals. 

Matthew’s cracked rib had all but twitched in agony at the thought, but he’d clamped down on the pain and tried to use it to fuel some sort of righteous anger. Isola might have saved his life, but that didn’t mean Matthew owed him a damn thing. He’d likely done it for self-serving reasons. Just because he wasn’t a mass murderer didn’t mean he was some sort of misunderstood Robin Hood-esque character. He was a greedy, arrogant, deceitful, leering conman and felon. Matthew had everything to lose by putting his trust in him- and he’d already lost his wand. 

The incident with Applewhite had to be some kind of misunderstanding, a figment of panic-induced paranoia. These sort of things happened all the time. You couldn’t trust your own mind in that sort of situation. He had no way of proving Applewhite had been the one to hit him with the stunner, and no way of proving Applewhite had intentionally left him to die. For all Matthew knew, Michael Applewhite had actually thought he’d been dead, hit with a far more serious curse than a stunning spell. Even hardened hit wizards could make these kind of mistakes. What was more likely? That Isola was right and there was some sort of conspiracy to have Matthew killed off on what, a whim? Or that isola was, as usual, talking out of his arse and had every intention on making Matthew doubt which way was up and which was down. 

So Matthew had waited until Isola found an abandoned cave in the hills for them to camp out for the night in, wearily waved Matthew over to help him collect materials for a fire, and then attacked him. He’d almost wrested away Isola’s wand before he’d gotten kneed in the crotch, headbutted in the nose, and hit with a leg-locker, which rendered him helpless to do anything but ineffectively throw rocks and sticks at Isola. 

“Ninguna buena acción queda sin castigo,” had quickly become Jaime Isola’s refrain for the few days following that. Or as he’d put it in English, “Since you decided you wanted this to be a hostage situation, now it’s a hostage situation. So from now on, you don’t so much as take a shit without asking me for permission, got it? ¿Lo entiendes?” He’d also taken Matthew’s shoes. And anything else on his person that could conceivably be used to either run away or as a weapon. Including his belt, which had been particularly humiliating. The week following that had been more or less the same degrading routine. 

Matthew would wake up, eat whatever food Jaime had scavenged or managed to cook himself, apparate alongside to wherever Jaime intended to go next- and he seemed to jump from town to town, location to location with startling frequency- and more or less sit there. For hours on end. With nothing to do besides listen to Isola’s occasional chatter or veiled threats, think about how worried Evie must be, and wonder if this was his life now. Shepherded around by the man he’d arrested seven-odd months ago until Jaime either decided to release him, which seemed unlikely, kill him, which seemed increasingly likely, or sell him out to any number of people who might have a grudge against the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Or just any passing warlock, hag, werewolf, or vampire looking for fresh meat.

If he was being honest, he’d expected Jaime to eventually get fed up enough with the burden of keeping him fed and clothed that he’d graduate to some light torture or mutilation himself, but aside from warning that he wasn’t ‘above’ using a Crucio here or there if Matthew continued to try to fight him, he didn’t lay so much as a finger on him. Watching Isola go about his days, disappearing and reappearing from whichever hovel they were currently hiding out in, was becoming something of a spectator sport for Matthew. 

As far as he could tell, there was no larger gang or organization that Jaime reported back to. No ‘friends’ or cronies ever accompanied him. He didn’t seem to have a girlfriend or lovers of any kind. If he had a permanent home, he showed little interest in returning to it. He talked to himself (or Matthew) regularly, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, but didn’t seem unstable or paranoid. He smoked and drank like a fish but was never intoxicated enough in front of Matthew to let his guard down or be within reach to physically subdue. He healed the broken rib, badly, straddling Matthew’s paralyzed legs and tying his wrists to a broken radiator to do so, and did not react beyond blinking in disgust when Matthew spat in his face.

“You got a lot of anger to work through, under that good old boy, ‘pat me on the back, I pat yours’ exterior, huh,” Jaime had observed archly instead. “Yeah. Maybe this will be good for you. Lots of time alone with those thoughts. You know what helps?”

“Alcohol?” Matthew had been desperate enough at that point for any kind of intoxication, anything to forget about his current bleak situation, to beg. Most nights he dreamed of Evelyn and Beth. Once he'd woken up shaking- in his nightmare he'd arrived home only to find them dead in the greenhouse, Evie's beloved plants having taken root over their crumpled bodies. That's not real. That will never be real. He can't give up hope like this. He will get out of this situation and come back to them, and everything will be alright. 

Jaime’s compromise had been letting him have three cap-fuls of fire whiskey.

Two weeks into this, Jaime had unceremoniously thrown a very tattered copy of The Daily Prophet into his lap so he could read the headline story. 

HERO AUROR FEARED DEAD AFTER HIT WIZARD OPERATION

At that point Matthew had been deemed ‘trustworthy’ enough to no longer be restrained in any way, and had made full use of those faculties by pacing back and forth in increasing aggravation as he read through the story beneath it, scowling whenever his eyes flitted over the name Gaunt. “This is complete bollocks. I mean- this is Gaunt, saying this, he’s acting like they brought my bones back home-,”

“Maybe they did,” Jaime had shrugged. “Dress up a fucked up corpse, give it some burn marks and a carrot patch on its head,” he nodded to Matthew’s ruddy hair, “bury it, call it a day. You’d be surprised! One time my friend Camilo, he comes to me, and he goes Jaime, this body, we need it to not have a head. But it can’t look like we cut it off ourselves. So I say, sure, let’s rig something up, and that, you know, is how they used to set up the guillotines in France when they were killing all the aristocrats-,”

“Applewhite,” Matthew had said, feeling a sort of sodden wave of dismay, anger, and horror crashing over him as he for the first time forced himself to fully consider it. “Applewhite must have gotten some- some orders from him to… to knock me off and make it look like some… some heroic sacrifice so he could use my death for… for political fodder and…” He’d trailed off, then, disgusted. 

He hadn’t wanted to believe it. Hadn’t wanted to consider that he could be so foolish, so naive, as to think Gaunt wouldn’t dare meddle into department affairs, that the sense of amity between him and Applewhite was merely office posturing, not indicative of a deeper motive, of any collusion or scheming- Does Joan suspect? Is she safe? What about Evie and Beth? It was one thing to think they were worrying about him, even mourning him. Another to think that they might be in danger themselves. Something cold is snaking down his spine. He has to get his hands on a wand. He needs to get home to them. It’s already been weeks. 

“He could have done this with any auror,” Jaime had pointed out. “You know, two weeks ago I asked, I did, but you weren’t listening, were you, too caught up in your little delusion cycle about how I was pulling one over on you- I asked, who might want you dead, and what did you do? Tried to kill me. See, I wasn’t asking who might want me dead, so maybe you misunderstood-,”

“Gaunt,” Matthew blurted out then. He still doesn’t trust Isola, but Isola obviously wasn’t working for Gaunt, that’s for certain, and he had more to gain than lose by confiding in him at this point. “Gaunt wants me dead. Maybe because he thinks I’d be a threat to him-,”

“Self-flattery, interesting,” Jaime had commented under his breath, “good to see you haven’t lost that spark-,”

“Or maybe because…” Matthew wasn’t really sure how to word this. It seems so petty and juvenile to actually voice aloud. He’s not a boy anymore. He hasn’t… he’s tried not to think about it. It was easier not to, especially after Amy broke things off like that. It’s not that he’s still pining after her. He’s moved on. She’ll always be a friend, he’ll always care about her well-being, but it was never… If it was love, it was a childish kind of love, no less meaningful but not necessarily built on the strongest foundations. She was charming and pretty in her way and so effortlessly warm that it was difficult not to feel great affection for her, very quickly. Being around her always felt natural, comforting. 

“We were in school at the same time,” he’d said, flushing slightly. “Same year. There was… a girl.” It seemed odd to describe Amy in such simple terms. “He… he wanted her, she was going out with me, it ended badly.”

“Not,” Jaime had said with a certain lopsided smirk, “the lovely Evelyn, I hope? Because I have to say, there’s cold, and then there’s ice cold, axing a man so you can crawl into bed with his widow-,”

“Not Evelyn,” Matthew had barked, hands clenching into fists. Jaime blinked languidly and gestured for him to continue. “I- she actually ended up moving to Gibraltar, I think, we still exchange cards at the holidays, or we did… Amy. Her name was Amy. They came up out of the same orphanage, it was an open secret, and he was… very attached to her. Her to him, I think, until she saw him for what he was.”

Jaime, to his surprise, had seemed struck. “Amy Benson?” he’d asked, with the incredulous but almost delighted tone of a child on Christmas morning, who can’t quite believe the present they’ve just received. “Short,” he indicated with a hand, “mousy brown hair, runs her mouth, beautiful blue eyes-,”

Matthew had made a choked sort of sound of disbelief. “Don’t tell me you know her.”

“Know her? Abbott, we are old friends, her and I,” Jaime had in fact seemed unable to contain himself, his hands jumping around the way they often did when he was in excited. “You mean to tell me- you, Gaunt, and her had a little playground scuffle… Schoolyard romance? Are you fucking with me?”

“I am not fucking with you,” Matthew had said, greatly disturbed, trying to even imagine Jaime and Amy in the same room, nevermind as ‘old friends’. “I- how do you know her?”

Jaime had just grinned. “It all makes sense now. Gaunt’s still got himself twisted up over her- what, having a little fling with you-,”

“It wasn’t a fling, we were sixteen!” Matthew snapped. “We dated, for God’s sake. It was very innocent.”

“I’m sure. Ah, you should have told me from a start! It’s like they say, Friar. Never underestimate a man in love.”

“He never loved her,” Matthew snapped. “That’s now what I would call it. Or any sensible person.”

Jaime had sobered then, some of the incredulous, smug delight draining from his weathered face. “Yeah? Give me a month, and I could write you an entire novel about the fucked things people do to the ones they love. No need to consecrate it. There are no rules or commandments. It’s not religious, just chemicals. And chemicals make us tick. And love- well, those are some potent, nasty chemicals when they’re not mixed correctly. Any potioneer could tell you that, Matteo.”

Now he clambers to his feet, rubbing sleep from his eyes. It’s mid-May, a full month since Bilbao. They’ve finally made it to Madrid, which Jaime has only recently revealed was his goal all along. Matthew can’t say much for this flat or the tenement neighborhood around it, but he at least feels slightly less hopeless than he did a few weeks ago. Jaime has been noticeably more genial and trusting of him since he mentioned Amy, and they appear to be in a magical district not a muggle one, judging from the vendors hawking wares in the streets and the brightly colored clothes and hats of their neighbors. It has to be a sign of trust that Jaime would risk bringing him to an area where he could more easily get his hands on a wand, or flag someone down for help.

Jaime Isola shuffles out of the tiny closet that passes for a bathroom, looking slightly sheepish. “Let me just say,” he says, “our downstairs neighbors did not appreciate me emptying the toilet out the window. So I think we’re better off taking the back stairwell this morning.”

Matthew has crossed to the mostly empty cupboard. “We’re going somewhere?” he asks in a forcibly casual tone. Improved relations or not, common tie of Amy or not, they are still technically captor and prisoner, and he is not going to repeat the mistakes he made with Applewhite by assuming Jaime has the best intentions. He might not want Matthew dead, but that doesn’t mean they’re good mates all of a sudden just because they both have ample reason to despise Tom Gaunt and mistrust the Ministry.

“Well,” Jaime says, inspecting a very bruised banana on the kitchen counter, “it’s been about twenty days since you last tried to murder me, so I think we’ve made some real progress, no? Keeping that in mind, and the fact that you did not let me choke on my own vomit last night-,”

Matthew neglects to mention that he had taken advantage of the fact that Jaime had drunk far more than usual to check all the windows and doors, but they’d been sealed shut and the most he’d been able to manage with wandless magic in the past month was a very basic levitation of a fork or spoon here and there, and a few odd sparks when he was frustrated. 

“I’ve decided that you’ve earned yourself a new wand,” Jaime claps him on the back, pressing the moldering banana into his hands. “Eat up, and prepare yourself. Not very often an Englishman gets the Garrido experience!”

Matthew stares down at the banana in disgust, wishing more than anything for a plate of bacon. Or eggs. Or anything other than rotting fruit or moldy bread, really. He will say Isola makes a mean pot of coffee, though. “And how are we paying for my new wand, exactly?”

Jaime grins. “How much do you need that extra kidney, really?” At the look on Matthew’s face, he snorts. “Calm down. I’ve managed to get us a pretty sizable loan from a very kindly benefactor.”

“Isola,” Matthew says through his teeth, “I am not paying for a wand with blood money.”

“Why is it always the worst case scenario with you people?” Jaime demands. “Relax. He’s an Englishman, like yourself. Says you were a former student of his, actually.”

“He’s a teacher?” Matthew sets down the banana, selects a dubious looking peach instead, and rifles through the mostly empty cabinets for a knife. Jaime flicks his wand, and the peach halves itself in his palm, splattering overripe juice across his by now very faded and worn trousers. 

“He was,” Jaime shrugs. “Now he’s got a villa, a book club, and a functional security system, thanks to yours truly.” He jabs a thumb at his chest. “I, ah... rerouted a shipment of… fuck, what do you call them in English?- Shrieking Tiles? Screamy Boards? Something like that. Straight to his doorstep.”

“He offered you a loan because you got him some squealing floorboards?” Matthew asks flatly.

“Well, I also saved his life two days ago when I walked in on some hired muscle trying to murder him- damn, your Minister works fast- so that might have something to do with it,” Jaime says, rolling back his shoulders triumphantly. “Little fuck didn’t even see me coming. You could even say… he never saw what hit him.” He grins. “A Killing Curse. It was a Killing Curse.”

“You have confessed to so many crimes in the past four weeks that I’m not even sure if you’re serious anymore when you tell me these things,” Matthew informs him. “Why are you smiling?”

“Because it was a job well done!” Jaime sounds almost offended. “You don’t take pride in your work? Shame. Shame. You were grinning like a stuffed pig when you clapped those handcuffs on me back in October-,”

“I didn’t use an Unforgivable on you. Or anyone, for that matter-,”

“Who decides what’s forgivable? You think I forgive you for putting me in an interrogation room with Tom Gaunt?” Jaime turns away from him, heading into the small bedroom to get his jacket and shoes, but Matthew can see the sudden tension blooming in his posture, from the way his shoulders hunch and his head bows slightly, even without looking at his face. He feels a pang of guilt. No, he had no idea of knowing what Gaunt might do in there, but he should have fought harder, convinced Pike to deny the interview request. He doesn’t doubt it was traumatic.

“For what it’s worth,” he calls after Jaime, somewhat weakly, “when I got on the wrong side of him in school, he had two of his mates take turns stomping my face in below a stairwell.”

Jaime returns, bomber jacket on, fingering his sunglasses at the collar of his brightly patterned shirt. “Yeah, maybe,” he says, “but I’d take a beating over some sick bastard slipping his grimy little fingers inside my brain and rooting around any day.”

Matthew winces in sympathy as he spits out the peach rind in the sink. “He was looking for Amy?” He doesn’t even need to ask. Tom has never struck him as the type to move on from that sort of thing, and it’s obvious Amy eventually ended things with him for good, one way or another. Matthew hopes that stung like hell. He has a vivid, sickening memory of Tom holding him back after a prefect meeting their seventh year. By the popular school gossip, he and Amy were no longer together by then, but Matthew had his doubts all the same. Could she really have just talked him into letting her go? 

“Matthew,” he’d smiled, but there’d been nothing behind it, nothing in those eyes at all except a cool contempt, and beneath that, in the way he held himself, a linger, simmering sort of animosity that made Matthew feel like he was standing next to a pot on the verge of boiling over. “I see on the schedule that you and Amy Benson are supposed to share a curfew patrol next week.” Matthew still has no idea why Tom had ever insisted on using her full name, as if either of them might be confused as to why ‘Amy’ he was referring to. She was the only prefect with the name, for Morgana’s sake.

“Yeah,” Matthew had said brusquely, unwilling to admit the slight tendril of fear- not so much of Tom but of- he didn’t know what, just a general unease, a sense that he was lingering in the doorway of a vast hall of horrors he should absolutely not venture into, the sort of place that oozed dread and apprehension. “What about it?” 

For all his brave talk back then, he will admit now that when it was just the two of them, alone in that empty classroom, he had still not been able to bring himself to ever confront Tom to his face about it, to tell him that he knew, that Amy certainly knew, that he was fooling no one with his innocent Golden Boy act, pretending he had nothing to do with half the people Rowle or Lestrange went after in their ample spare time. 

Tom’s smile had not wavered, nor had the confident veneer of disdain in his look. “I think it’s best we switch you with Peggy O’Connor that week. You know, she’s supposed to be patrolling with Phillip Lance, and those two can’t be trusted not to shag off their duties in order to grope each other in broom closets. Best to break that up now before it becomes more of an issue. I’d hate to have to speak with them about it personally. Wouldn’t want to step on any toes.”

“Slughorn drew up the schedules for this month,” Matthew had said, fighting back the surge of anger. “So I suppose you’d better go talk with him, then-,”

“Oh, he’s given myself and Evelyn full leave to adjust them as we see fit,” Tom had said, gathering up his bookbag with a practiced casual air. He’d slung it over one shoulder, not a gelled dark hair out of place atop his high, pale brow. “So I thought I might as well go ahead and make the necessary changes. So long as you’re in agreement, of course.” That tone of vague mock sympathy. “I know you and Amy used to be good friends.”

“We are friends,” Matthew had spat back at him, then stopped himself. He’d considered, more than once, when he’d really been upset that she’d broken things off with him, had considered making more of a statement, taking a stand, telling her she didn’t know what she was on about, that they belonged together and Tom could go take a long walk off a short pier, but he’d thought better of it. She’d made it very clear that wasn’t what she wanted, and she wouldn’t be browbeaten or guilted into anything she did not want. And it wouldn’t make him much better than Tom Riddle to ignore her wishes, would it?

And he’s also considered, more than once, that it might work both ways. That as much as she obviously felt she was keeping him out of harm’s way by breaking it off, that it might be protecting her as well. Not that he thought she’d done it for selfish reasons. Quite the contrary. But as much as part of him, in that moment, had wanted to tell Tom exactly where he could shove it, and exactly how ‘good friends’ he and Amy had been, and how free and wonderful she’d been with him, and how he hadn’t had to threaten or blackmail anyone to take her out on a bloody date, he’d gotten ahold of his temper. 

He didn’t want to make things any worse for her than they already might be. In public, her and Tom barely seemed to acknowledge each other’s existence anymore. In private, Matthew wasn’t so sure. And it didn’t seem worth the risk of inciting Tom into flying into some rage with her at some point in the future. Matthew wanted to think he wouldn’t actually hurt her himself. That it was just everyone else he saw as expendable, as worthless unless they were licking the dirt off his shoes. 

But he also suspected that was just wishful thinking, and that someone who would convince two of his ‘friends’ to beat someone else half to death over feeling spurned and jealous, might also be the sort of person who would not hesitate to hurt the object of his twisted affections if he felt like she’d damaged his pride or ego.

Tom had stared at him with interest, as if hoping Matthew was about to snap, eagerly waiting for an excuse to retaliate. Matthew had swallowed, and repeated himself in a far milder voice, “That’s fine. Really. Of course I don’t mind patrolling with Peggy instead.”

“Excellent,” Tom had said readily. “I knew you’d be decent about it, Abbott. Thank you. Bit of a thankless job at times, Head Boy. All work, little reward.” He’d smiled that same banal smile.

I’m sure you’ve got your rewards all planned out, you delusional bastard, Matthew had thought, and went on his way to quidditch practice, and tried to ignore the pain in his chest when Amy came bounding out of the locker room with Patsy Samson on her heels, old school broom in hand, smiling brightly. 

He turns back to Jaime now, still slightly leery that this is really happening. “We’re going, then?”

“After you,” Jaime gestures at the front door, “knob’s still a bit sticky. Don’t mind that. Had a little mishap applying the blood-,”

Matthew sighs, undoes the bolts, and wrenches it open at last, fighting back a wave of revulsion at the sight of the carved, rusty runes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. For unclear reasons this chapter was like pulling teeth and I went through three separate attempts at different POVs before I settled on Matthew. Initially it was going to give us a brief look at how Amy and Jaime first met, then cut to Matthew in the aftermath of his rescue? capture? by Jaime, but that wasn't working out, so I switched to a single Matthew POV. Consequently this chapter is shorter than I had planned but the next chapter will cover the beginning of the 1958 school year and be a Mae POV with quite a bit happening, so hopefully that will make up for this lackluster lull.
> 
> 2\. We will be jumping back and forth in time a lot this fic. Last chapter was set in August, now we jump back to late May, a month after Matthew's supposed death, which finds him more or less having been Jaime's prisoner for those past weeks. As he does not have a wand and most wizards in HP are established as being pretty useless at magic without a wand, them's the breaks. (He also doesn't win any favors from Jaime by refusing to accept that he was set up by Applewhite and attacking Jaime right off the bat). 
> 
> 3\. We've seen an arguably kinder and fuzzier side of Jaime Isola through Amy's eyes in a few scenes, but I wanted to reinforce in this chapter, especially in Matthew's opinion, that he is a very morally grey character and wizard. He doesn't go out of his way to be cruel or malicious towards others, but he's fully capable of taking lives or using magic Matthew considers to be dark and evil when pushed. He has absolutely no shame about casually discussing killing someone, clearly has a creative interpretation of the law and what justifies breaking it, and is very much upfront about what he doesn't regret. (What he does regret is another story). 
> 
> 4\. Matthew is kind of delusional for a good chunk of this chapter in his reluctance to accept that this was a deliberate attempt to kill him off and then use his death for political points. Part of that can be chocked up to general shock, being constantly hungry and sleep-deprived, and the perhaps more pressing day to day worries of 'am I about to be actually murdered, for good this time'. However he does eventually accept that yes, this was a set-up, and yes, Jaime is probably right that it's pretty convenient Tom just so happened to decide Matthew had to be the auror to get killed off. 
> 
> 5\. We get more of Matthew's thoughts about Amy! Unlike Tom, he has moved on with his life and does not spend several waking hours a day pretending he isn't obsessing over his ex. Matthew regrets how it ended and wishes he could have helped Amy more or stood up to Tom in a meaningful way, but ultimately accepts that they were all just teenagers and he couldn't force Amy to be with him anymore than Tom could. Not for lack of trying on Tom's part. He also identifies some of the serious problems with Tom, ie. his manipulative and controlling nature and inability to let Amy make her own choices. The memory of Tom meddling with the prefect patrol schedule during their seventh year kind of just illustrates the extreme lengths Tom would go to to make sure Amy was completely 'his'- not even wanting her to be patrolling with Matthew in case they reconnected. 
> 
> 6\. I just found the part where Jaime lights up like a kid on Christmas at the realization that he and Matthew both know Amy very funny to write. Unlike Tom, Jaime is genuinely thrilled when he realizes Matthew and Amy used to go out, and finds it all very intriguing and almost soap opera-worthy. Matthew also gets a bit of sympathy for him when he realizes that Tom's brutal interrogation involved intruding into Jaime's very mind, and that it clearly has affected him, for all that he comes across as unflappable and taking nothing seriously.
> 
> 7\. Three guesses as to who this former Hogwarts teacher camped out in Madrid who Tom might also want out of the picture is. 
> 
> 8\. As always, you can find me at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/) if you want to further discuss the fic or suggest prompts.


	26. Mae X

HOGWARTS, SEPTEMBER 1958

“ _I promise_ ,” Mae says, “ _you’ll like it loads better here_.”

The adder in her hands wriggles as she zig-zags around the empty row of greenhouses. Technically, Mae is not supposed to be roaming the school grounds unaccompanied before the semester has officially begun. Technically, she’s not even supposed to be here, but Mum had some paperwork to finish, the Hogwarts express isn’t due to arrive for forty five minutes, and she ‘doesn’t feel comfortable’ leaving Mae alone in the cottage by herself after dusk. Usually this would have devolved into an argument over how ridiculous that is, but Mae had ulterior motives in accompanying Mum up to the castle today.

Said motive is warm and scaly and in her hands. “ _Stop fussing_ ,” Mae snaps. “ _I am trying to help you- do not bite_!” Adder bites are rarely fatal, but it would still hurt like hell. She found this one coiled up and frightened in a garden shed. Professor Beery is fond of snakes and wouldn’t hurt him, but the other students would- Mae knows their type. Nasty boys who joke about stomping rats’ heads in or using rabbits for target practice. Mae’s killed more small animals than she can count, but it was always for a purpose- to help another animal. Snakes have a hard enough time finding food as it is, people always trying to use them for spells or kill them for sport. It’s not fair. 

“ _Put me down_!” the adder is wailing, or would be, if a snake could wail. It’s settled for distraught hissing instead. “ _Put me down, warmblood fur-skin-toothless-witch-child_!”

“ _You’re being very dramatic_ ,” Mae snarls, darting through the long grass, which licks at her knees pleasingly. “ _You want to get your head chopped off with a spade? Yeah? Mick Applewhite would kill you and skin you with a pocket knife, alright, him and his little Gryffindor cronies. I’m helping you!_ ”

The adder disagrees, poising for a vicious bite to her forearm. Mae growls under her breath and grips it firmly by the back of its triangular head, pinioning it so it can’t deliver the strike. The end of its black tail whips uselessly at the hem of her skirt; it’s very young, not even a foot long yet. “ _Bad_ ,” she snaps down at it; a girl, she thinks, given the coloring. “ _Bad snake_!”

“ _When you set me down_ ,” the adder vows, “ _I will strike at your heel until you are dead, womanchild_!”

“ _I’m not a womanchild_ ,” Mae grimaces. “Honestly.”

“ _Your descendants will still feel my venom! And they will curse your name_!”

“ _I thought you were going to kill me_ ,” she mocks, then breathes a sigh of relief as the root cellar at the back of the largest greenhouse comes into view. Wrinkling her nose, she manages to secure the adder with one clenched hand while the other pries open one of the heavy wooden doors; she broke open the lock with an Alohomora charm two days ago, while she was planning her adder rescue. Officially, she’s not supposed to know that spell yet, but she’s seen Mum use it loads of times, and the Trace can’t pick up her underage magic while she’s on school grounds. A musty, earthy smell emanates from the dug-out cellar. Mae scoops the flailing adder back up, narrowly avoiding another bite, and stumbles down the rotting wooden steps into the dark.

The tank she stole from an old potions storeroom in the dungeons is right where she left it. Mae has to squint to see it, but it’s mere moments to dump the adder in, then illuminate her wand. “ _Look_ ,” she says encouragingly, “ _it’s way nicer down here. You’ll like it, I promise. I’ll bring you food every day until you’re big enough to survive on your own_.”

The adder hisses in response, slithering around the length of the glass tank, which is large enough to comfortably hold it, a water dish, some plants and branches, and warm dirt and sand she shoveled in from the quidditch pitch. Mae smiles reassuringly down at it while she slides the wire-frame lid on. The adder immediately tries to push its way out, but Mae weighs down the lid with a few rocks. “ _I even got you a light_ ,” she says. “ _Look, it’s an Ever-Lantern._ ” She rubs the base; a magical green flame bursts into the charmed bulb, casting an eerie pallor across the cellar. Mae likes how it makes her pale skin look, all watery and murky. “ _Okay? This will keep you warm_.” She positions it so it’s shining down into the tank. 

The adder’s tongue flicks in and out in displeasure. 

Mae rummages through a burlap sack in the corner. “ _Look what I got you_!” She deposits the stiff dead mouse in the tank. “ _There’s loads more where that came from, trust me. The castle has tons of mice and rats. Maybe I can even get you a mole_.”

“ _I would prefer the blood of your kinsmen_ ,” the adder retorts.

Mae scoffs. “ _You’ll thank me later. What’s your name_?”

“ _Night-Without-Stars_.” Snakes can’t preen, but this one would if she could, Mae’s sure of it. “ _My scales are beautiful_.”

Mae wants to suggest a different name, like Audrey, but Mum’s always been very strict about respecting people’s names. “Alright.” She crouches down so she can inspect the tank once more. “ _I have to go now, but I’ll come back tomorrow morning after breakfast to feed you again_.”

Night-Without-Stars balefully watches her clamber up the steps and back into the twilight. 

Mae’s not stupid; she’s careful to brush the dirt off her shoes before she meets up with Mum at the gates leading back down into the village. “This is stupid,” she says, before Mum even has the chance to greet her. “I have to walk all the way back down just so I can take the carriages back up?”

“You’d rather be the only one sitting in the Great Hall with a bunch of professors?” Mum retorts, then frowns. “Where did you go? I thought you were in the library.”

“I went for a walk,” Mae says shortly. _You filthy liar_ , she thinks. True, she’s been perfectly cordial- well, perfectly Mae-like- with Mum since Aunt Ruby returned to the States and the summer wound down. There have been no big fights, no tense discussions, no running away, sneaking off, or spying. But that doesn’t mean Mae’s forgotten. The dog tags around her neck always feel so cold now, unfamiliar. Maybe she misunderstood. It’s not impossible. 

Maybe what Mum was saying was that FW Shelby is really Mae’s father, but she made the dog tags up so Mae would have something to remember him by, that they’re fakes. But that doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t she able to get the real ones? What, did she have to give the real ones to his family or something? But she always said he didn’t have much family at all; that was why there was no one for them to visit when they returned to England, no long-lost Shelby relatives, no aunts or uncles or cousins. 

Mae’s done assuming the best, when it comes to her. It’s not that she hates Mum now. Of course she doesn’t. Mum probably thinks it’s for the best, whatever she’s concocted. But that doesn’t mean Mae owes her any trust, either. If FW Shelby isn’t real- or if he is, but he’s not her father, then who is? Why would Mum feel she had to lie about it, anyways? If it was just some random man she could just say that. Unless she thought it might upset Mae, to think there was no story behind it, no romance or grand gestures. It wouldn’t. Mae’s twelve now, practically a teenager. It wouldn’t bother her, she tells herself firmly. Even if he was some nobody that Mum met in a bar or a club, it wouldn’t bother her. 

But she is bothered. Mae’s done the math now, properly, with the assistance of one of Mum’s medical texts. Going back from her birth date, give or take a few weeks- she was conceived quite literally right before or after Mum left Britain for France. Maybe there is some innocent explanation. Maybe Mum wanted to cut loose after she dealt with Tom Gaunt, maybe she just met someone at random. Maybe she was celebrating her new life abroad, those first few days. Thinking about it makes Mae distinctly uncomfortable, of course, because it’s Mum. She doesn’t want to think about her mum and sex as being even remotely connected. She doesn’t want to think about someone impregnating her mother. 

Before it felt safe and comforting. He was someone and he was fighting the Nazis and he was brave. He was important to Mum. He meant something. Now that comforting image- the smeared pencil sketch of a young man, propped up in a hospital cot, dark curls and a long, narrow face, his kind eyes- has been replaced by a gaping hole, a void. And there is nothing to fill it, so like any scab, she keeps picking and picking at it instead, even though it hurts horribly. Why would Mum lie? Why would Ruby know, and probably Danny and Vera too, and maybe even Teddy and Patsy, but not Mae? Why wouldn’t she just tell her the truth?

 _Because she doesn’t trust you_ , the little voice says, as Mae begrudgingly picks her way down the rocky dirt lane to the darkened village, the last rays of the sunset illuminating the Black Lake. Because she doesn’t trust you at all and she never has. But that’s not true. It can’t be true. There’s nothing untrustworthy about Mae. Okay, she lies sometimes and she can be reckless and she has a temper, but she’s not a bad person. _Maybe he was. Maybe she’s ashamed_. 

Mae’s never thought of Mum as being ashamed of anything. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her. She’s not intimidated by gossip or disapproval. 

_She’s not ashamed of me, either_ , she thinks. _She can’t be. I would know_.

But why would she lie?

She pushes the thoughts away as she finally trudges onto the station platform, hearing the wail of the Hogwarts Express’ whistle just around the bend. Mae plops down onto a bench, pulling her blazer tighter around her narrow shoulders. Her hair is cut longer than it was last year, nearly to her shoulders instead of bobbed at her chin. She thinks it makes her face look thinner and less baby-ish, makes her look older. Mum was absurdly upset that Mae doesn’t want to wear headbands anymore, or at least not that stupid polka dot one. The one she’s got on now is very thin and black velvet, instead. It looks much more sophisticated.

 _Since when did you care about looking sophisticated?_ She can almost hear Mum’s dry voice in her head.

_Since when did you start lying to me?_

The train pulls in, a clamor of noise and sweeping lights. Mae watches stoically as the doors open and the first wave of students pour out. The first years seem especially tiny, nothing like her last year. The older students are just one strange face after another. She recognizes some of the older Ravenclaws, but not many. Mae’s gaze roves across figure after figure until she half-rises, spotting a familiar one.

“Hiya,” she says somewhat despondently to Malcolm, after pushing her way through the crowd. 

He blinks at her in surprise, seemingly taken aback that she would seek him out. “Hi.”

“Where’s Marian and Valerie?” Mae presses. 

He shrugs. 

“They’re your friends too,” she snaps. 

“What’s with you?” he snorts. “Valerie, yeah, but she’s like- you know.” He gestures. “Like you.”

“Like me?”

“A tomboy,” he says. “Most girls our age aren’t going to want to be friends with boys unless the’re dating.”

Mae is baffled. “People are dating?”

“Sure,” he says. “Alec ditched me on the train to go chat up Daphne Yates.”

“Marian has a boyfriend now?”

“No,” he seems exasperated. “But she could. What’s with you, really? You’re acting all jumpy.”

“I’m not,” she says, and hates how shrill she sounds. “I just- I’m sick of everything being different.”

Malcolm looks unconvinced, but shrugs. “I’m getting a carriage. You coming or not?”

Angrily, she follows him across the platform and towards the horseless carriages. Mae groans under her breath when she sees a familiar blonde head moving towards them. Malcolm snorts under his breath. Christine appears, looking much the same as she did last year; hair in neat blonde braids, pug nose, red cheeks, round face, wire specs. She is slightly taller than Mae now, though, to Mae’s disgust. 

“There you are,” she huffs. “Honestly. Marian saw you and made me come get you,” her tone implies that she greatly resents this chore. “Let’s go, she’s already got a carriage.”

“Is Valerie there?” Mae asks flatly. She doesn’t feel like being the third wheel to Marian and Christine’s friendship bicycle. 

Christine rolls her eyes. “Yes. Don’t be stupid.”

“Don’t be such a bitch,” Mae snaps. Christine looks flabbergasted. Malcolm’s eyes widen. 

“Fine,” Christine sputters, when she’s regained her ability to speak. “Do what you want! I was trying to be nice!”

“Marian made you come over here, so clearly not-,”

“Goodbye!” Christine is already walking away.

Malcolm is staring at her, baffled. “What was that?”

“What?” Mae grouses, on edge. She feels like she’s electrical, sparking all over the place, causing everyone’s hair to stand on end. She can’t decide if she hates it or relishes it.

“Why did you snap at her like that?”

“Are you serious?” Mae scowls. “She treated me horribly last year! Always muttering under her breath and giving me dirty looks- we only ever speak to each other because of Marian-,”

“Well, aren’t you friends with Marian?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what she sees in Christine! She’s awful,” Mae says, “and I don’t see why I have to play nice just because we’re roommates.”

“Valerie’s gonna love this,” he says sarcastically. “All she ever complained about last year was how you two kept arguing over nothing.”

“It’s not nothing! Her dad’s a pig, anyways,” Mae says definitively, “and so is her bully of a brother, and so is she, she just likes to pretend she’s Miss Dignified.”

Malcolm looks as if he is never going to understand girls, and starting to doubt whether he even wants to. “Well,” he says, “if you’re done ranting about Christine, can we get a bloody carriage? ‘Cause they’re filling up quickly.”

They get a carriage with two Slytherins, and the ride up to the castle follows in short order. When they finally step down and move to join the crowd filing through the wrought iron gates, she feels less relieved and more defeated. She was so eager to go back to school, but now she’s remembering every little annoyance and aggravation from the year before. Maybe it will be better when classes start. At least she’ll have something to distract herself with. 

Unsurprisingly, while the night sky glittering above the Great Hall is something of a reassurance, Mae does not find the sight of the head table and Mum seated among all the other black robed professors to be all that comforting. Dumbledore is smiling pleasantly and chatting away with Professor Witherspoon, and Mum is talking to Finch and Penvenen, no surprise there. Mae shuffles along with the line of murmuring Ravenclaws to their table, and finds herself on one side of Valerie, who at least looks pleased to see her, with Marian and Christine whispering to each other on the other side. Mae doesn’t even bother trying to eavesdrop.

Just about the only interesting thing happening at their table is that a few people are gossiping about how Eileen Prince must have fell in with a ‘certain crowd’ over the summer, because she’s dressing like a total Judie. Mae can tell from here that she’s done something different with her thick dark hair, pulled it back and piled it atop her head in a sort of greased pompadour, with a few locks hanging across her sallow forehead. She’s wearing her blazer differently too, in a sort of purposefully draped fashion, and she’s got a cameo brooch on her chest, across from her prefect’s badge, probably stolen from her mother. Mae glances under the table. Black leather brogues. She’s a Teddy Girl, alright. At least she’s not in Slytherin; they’d tear her to shreds- a Prince, dressing like muggle delinquents? But maybe that’s what she wants. There is something different to the set of Eileen Prince’s pale face; almost defiant, challenging, even if she’s as quiet as ever. Hughie Weaver, sitting across from her, looks almost intimidated by her stony demeanor. 

But then the Sorting begins, and Mae’s distracted again, if only for the first few names. It’s not as if she knows anyone entering Hogwarts this year, and honestly, everyone can tell this is going to be a long one when it’s been ten minutes and they’ve only just started the Bs. “Look, Beery’s nodding off,” Valerie whispers to her, and they share a momentary giggle before one of the prefects shushes them sternly. Mae waits until he’s turned his back and then pulls a face. 

She scans the head table again. She’ll have all the same professors as last year; second years don’t get to choose any electives. Carmody looks more bored than anything else, murmuring the occasional comment back and forth with Professor Morgenstern. Mae looks to the very end of the table, where Madam Amell, the school nurse, sits beside Madam Rutherford, the librarian. She’s always wondered if they feel lesser, not being actual teachers. Everyone likes to make fun of Rutherford because she gets very agitated if you return books late or make a mess in the stacks, but Mae doesn’t mind her. What’s the point of becoming a librarian if you don’t care about books? And people do act like morons in the library; they tear pages out of books, write dirty jokes (even if they’re funny) in the margins, mess around on the rolling ladders.

Amell, though, well, Mae’s never had so much as a conversation with her- she never went to the Infirmary last year, which Mum said was a miracle, given how many times she decided to leap from the stairs while they were still moving, onto various landings. Mae studies her now, as the Sorting grinds its way through the Cs and Ds. She’s tall and grey-haired and must be in her fifties, at least. Mae doesn’t really know much about her, except that Mum used to volunteer in the Infirmary as a student, and that Amell recommended the Relief Services job to her, as on-the-ground healing experience.

Amell recommended…

Mae considers. Her options of who to squeeze information out of concerning Mum’s secrets from way back then are slim. Obviously she can’t write Aunt Ruby, who would immediately tell Mum. Same goes for Auntie V and Teddy and Patsy, if they know. They’d either pretend to be clueless, or tip Mum off. Maybe that would force Mum to just tell Mae straight off, but some spiteful, savage part of her doesn’t want that. She doesn’t want to be told. She wants to find out for herself and confront Mum with the full, ugly truth. She still feels that prickling, angry sensation. 

“Mae,” Valerie hisses.

Mae ignores her, gaze focused on Amell. She’ll have to be careful about. She and Mum may not be friends, really, more like former mentor and student, but that doesn’t mean she has no loyalty to Mum. But even if Amell doesn’t know everything, she’s got to have been spending loads of time around Mum shortly before she finished school, and she must know the people who Mum worked under while abroad, and maybe- if there’s even the slightest hint- maybe she can-

“Mae!” Valerie pinches her.

“What?” Mae whips around, then jumps as her fork clatters back down onto the table with a dull thud. She’d been levitating it without even realizing it. Without even casting the spell. She hasn’t done something like that in years, since she was a little kid, not in control of her magic. 

Valerie and Marian are both staring at her; luckily no one else, including Christine, who is acting as if the Sorting is a sermon she needs to pay careful attention to, has noticed. Mae’s cheeks flush pink, and she ducks her head, glancing away again. 

Her first class of the semester is a morning History of Magic lecture, which is honestly more like a free study hall than anything else. Binns is dead; he can’t really be counted upon to hold nearly thirty twelve year olds in order. Afterwards she has a two hour break until Transfiguration with Dumbledore. Mae wonders what he, too, knows that no one is telling her. Are all grownups liars, and she’s just surrounded by bad ones? If she ever had kids, she tells herself firmly, she’d never lie to them. Not even about Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny, unless they really wanted her to. 

It’s barely a few hours into the semester; the infirmary is empty, the cots neatly made, the curtains pushed back, the windows all open to let the late summer sunlight spill in. Mae thinks of Night-Without-Stars and feels a smattering of guilt, but she’s safer underground than curled up asleep in the gardening shed, about to be decapitated. Mae can take her out sometimes, to let her slither through some real grass. On the weekends, maybe, when she’s less likely to get caught skulking around the greenhouses. 

Mae raps on the office door at the back, shifting from foot to foot, her heavy schoolbag weighing down her shoulder. Finally, Amell calls, “Come in,” and she pushes the door open, traipsing into the small, well-organized office. It smells slightly less sterile than the infirmary proper, but it’s nowhere near as cozy and welcoming as Mum’s office. Maybe it’s because Amell was a Slytherin and they prefer things to be a bit more austere. Madam Amell sets down her book, and adjusts her reading glasses, looking surprised to see Mae. 

“Is something wrong, Miss Benson? It’s suspiciously early in the term to be coming down with a case of ‘get-out-class-itis’.”

Despite her wariness, Mae smiles slightly at the joke. “I’m fine. I was just wondering… if you needed any help around here? You know, in between classes and all.” She scuffs at the stonework floor with her shoe. “I was just thinking that maybe I could go into Healing someday, like my mum. Before she became the Potions professor, anyways.”

Amell is silent for a moment, studying her intently, and then says. “Well, why don’t you sit down, and we’ll discuss it.”

Mae sits. Amell smiles thinly. She does not have that kindly-old-man smile that Dumbledore has, nor does she have Carmody’s don’t-test-my-patience slit of a smile, or Mum’s tired, exasperated smile. Mae bites her lip as Amell puts her book away for good, removing her glasses. Up close, she looks a little younger than Mae had expected, not really an old woman, just… mature, maybe. Like she’s been here for ages and she’s seen all there is to see. Maybe even another Mae or two or three. 

“For all the office gossip I’ve heard concerning you,” she says, “not once have I heard that you share your mother’s passion for healing magic.”

Mae summons up all of her logic. “I’m twelve,” she reasons. “D’you know many twelve year olds with passions?”

Amell snorts. “For trouble-making, maybe.”

“I won’t make any trouble in here, I swear,” Mae vows. Only for Mum.

“Well, I would usually encourage someone your age to spend this time working on improving their charmwork and brewing skills,” Amell says, “but tell me, Mae, what do you find so interesting about your mother’s work?”

Mae ponders. The best lies have a grain of truth to them, right? “She gets to help people,” she says. “And fix them so it’s like they never even got hurt.”

“It’s not that simple, I’m afraid. Healing magic is far more extensive than muggle medicine, but even we can’t fix everything.”

“Most things,” Mae amends. “You can fix most things. Way better than muggle doctors could. Way faster, too. Bet that helped the people fighting Grindelwald, right?”

Amell exhales. “In some sense, yes. In other senses, I sometimes worry it cheapens the value we place on human life. There’s a tendency among wizards to act as though they’re invincible. Made of rubber, if you will. But we don’t bounce back from everything. Nor should we.”

Mae picks at the varnished arm of the wooden chair she’s sitting in. “And I liked growing up at the clinic. It was interesting. Mum let me see all kinds of cool things. She taught me how to do math using potions ingredients.”

“Well, your mother was always a very resourceful young woman,” Amell says. “I often wondered whether she’d have been just as successful in Slytherin.”

“If she’d worked in a regular hospital,” Mae continues, treading lightly, “I wouldn’t have been able to see any of that, right? She always said that’s why she decided to take over the clinic in Gibraltar from Mister Sabath. ‘Cause it would be better off for both of us, like that. Plus, it’s not like she did her training at Mungo’s. She was in France, wasn’t she?” She lets herself trail off for a believable number of seconds, counting them out in her head. “She doesn’t like to talk about that much, though. Only how she met my dad over there.”

Amell is very still. “Did she?” she inquires. “I’d always wondered…”

Mae forges ahead, banking on her forwardness seeming just like a chatty kid who’s oversharing. “He was a muggle,” she says. “A soldier. She met him in Loiret, I think.”

Amell’s brow creases. “Loiret? Are you sure it wasn’t Lille? Your mother’s supervising healer wrote to inform when-,” she cuts herself off, grimacing almost in embarrassment. “Never mind. That’s not very polite conversation, is it?”

“No,” says Mae, innocently, internally rejoicing at this incongruity. In Issue #54 of Detective Houndstooth, he says that the worst thing any liar can do is oversell their falsehoods. Add too many details. Try to come across like they remember everything, down to the littlest thing. Mum oversold it. She thought she was being as convincing as possible, answering all of Mae’s curious questions over the years- where did you meet him, what did he look like, why was he injured, what happened after that, did you love him, would he have liked me, how long did you know him for- but really she just tripped herself up. 

Amell shakes her head slightly, as if to change the subject. “I can see why it would seem very exciting. I’m sure your mother has plenty of thrilling stories. But if you want to spend some time here, I don’t think you’ll find it nearly half as entertaining, Miss Benson. Sweeping floors and changing bedsheets rarely is.”

“I don’t care,” Mae shrugs. “I don’t play Quidditch, and the only club I want to join this year is Dueling. Seems like I’d be spending a lot of time in here anyways, then.”

To her delight, Madam Amell does chuckle at that. “Alright,” she says. “But let’s remember that your schoolwork ought to be your first concern. You can come in here on Friday afternoons, when you’re done with classes. We’ll start from there.”

“Thank you,” Mae beams winningly at her, bounding up out of her seat. 

She’s all but grinning like the cat that caught the canary on her way to Transfiguration. Take that. Direct confirmation. It couldn’t have been him, because Mum wouldn’t have been in Loiret at a time for that to make sense. So she is a liar. If she got pregnant while abroad, it would had to have been well before that. Which means maybe it didn’t happen over there at all. Slowly, her smirk fades as she turns down the same corridor she and Christine once crept down, intent on stealing back that Remembrall. 

She’s always felt oddly nervous in this classroom since then. Does Dumbledore know? God, does everyone know but her? Her skin prickles again under the tight collar of her school blouse. Mae pokes at the metal dog tags underneath, and her hand momentarily claws at them. It’s not even true. Not any part of it. It’s all lies. She feels sick, but she pushes it down as she enters the loud classroom, making her way to her desk across from Malcolm and behind Marian.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Next chapter should involve dueling shenanigans, the Board of Governors, teenage rebellion, and possibly a very interesting Halloween.
> 
> 2\. Mae spends most of this chapter in a mood sort of similar to Harry in canon after Sirius' death. Mae hasn't actually lost anyone, but she feels like she has. Her entire image and narrative of who her father was has come crumbling down overnight. Worst of all, she has no one she can confide in about this, as she no longer trusts her mother or even her mother's close friends, and she certainly doesn't feel like she can tell her own friends about any of this. Typically, she is also lashing out at said friends (well, mostly Christine, who is more of an enemy, but still).
> 
> 3\. Adders are the only snakes native to Scotland, and in folklore was often considered to be the serpent in the Garden of Eden that tempts Eve to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In terms of sly references, here we have Mae getting dangerously close to knowledge of Good and Evil while insisting on caring for an adder in her spare time. 
> 
> 4\. While Mae's not a dumb kid and no longer accepting anything at face value, I did not want her to instantly leap to the conclusion that Tom must be her father. She is still pretty innocent in many regards and the idea of someone who her mother professes to hate and fear also being her father is not really something she's considered. She also does not know the exact timeline of Amy's final confrontation with Tom, and thus can't say 'oh, it can only be him'. What she does know is roughly when she was conceived, give or take a few weeks, and that it seems very likely that FW Shelby was probably not her actual father. This is confirmed in her mind when she manages to find out from Madam Amell (who facilitated Amy's work abroad in the first place) that there's no way Mae's dad could be a guy who Amy met in Loiret, because that would be way too late in the game. Amell knows roughly when Amy got pregnant as well because Amy was forced to report it to her supervisors when she finally found out, and they were more than capable of figuring out how far along in the pregnancy she was. 
> 
> 5\. Mae has some pretty powerful magic running through her veins, and if Harry can have a whole freak-out of accidental magic at age thirteen and blow up his aunt, I feel like it's safe to say that Mae could levitate some cutlery here and there unconsciously. 
> 
> 6\. "Amy really has to tell her." Yes, she really does, as it's no longer a question of 'if' Mae might find out, but 'when'. Her belief that she can just hold out a little longer in telling Mae is not really paying off for her anymore, even if she's unaware (or in denial) of how much Mae suspects. 
> 
> 7\. Side note: Eileen appears to be leaning into the rebellious Teddy Boy/Girl subculture of the late 50s, early 60s, which is sort of similar to the American Greaser culture of the time. This is the subject of a lot of gossip and speculation because the style originated among working class teenagers who often left school early to help support their families. Which Eileen, who is from a very wealthy and privileged background (for all that it makes her very unhappy) is very much not. 
> 
> 8\. As always you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	27. Mae XI - Lydia V

HOGWARTS, OCTOBER 1958

MAE

“If you know how to dance, you know how to duel,” Professor Carmody says, and while it gets a chorus of snickers and giggles the first time she says it, she doesn’t so much as smirk in acknowledgment of how silly that sounds. Rather, she makes them all dance. For the first month of meetings, she pairs up all the students present and has them dance. Swing, mostly- and the purebloods look completely nonplussed at anything other than traditional line dancing- Ambrose says the waltz and the two-step are just becoming popular at their balls now, as if it were fifty years past. But really anything that involves two partners and a fast pace, and she brings her own record player and her own music and her own little wooden metronome, and a dozen people drop out after the second week of it because they think it’s a massive waste of their time. 

Mae loves dancing just as much as she did before Hogwarts, although she’s a little rusty from being out of practice. Valerie is the only one willing to dance around their dormitory with her, and while she’s very enthusiastic, she’s all flailing arms and legs, like a colt. And Mum- Mae doesn’t really want to dance with her very much anymore. So even if she’s just as impatient as everyone else to get to the good stuff- the actual dueling- she doesn’t just tolerate two hours of swinging, trotting, strolling, and jiving. She actively looks forward to it, except when she’s paired up with someone she can’t stand for a dance or two, like John Amory or Christine. 

Much to Mae’s disgruntlement, while dancing with John Amory is like dragging around a corpse, Christine happens to be a very, very good dancer. Not as good as Mae, obviously, and the fact that she is two inches taller doesn’t help, but to Mae’s disgust they dance quite well together, and Christine rarely fumbles a move or missteps, like she’s got innate rhythm. Once Mae tried to trip her up by purposefully messing up the beat, but Christine quickly recovered and sent them spinning back into the flow of motion. Mae can still hear the annoying click-clack of Christine’s patent leather tap shoes- she brings them to meetings, the little kiss-arse, like she’s auditioning for a chorus line- on the hardwood floors, back and forth, back and forth. 

Carmody insists that once they can all reach 160 beats per minute, she’ll let them duel. She ignores all groans, complaints, whines, constructive criticism, and pleas. “If you don’t like it, leave.” is her mantra, and she sticks by it, even when Professor Dumbledore comes by to observe. Granted, he seems more entertained by it than anything else, commending Carmody on her dance instruction, and even demonstrating the Lindy Hop with her. Mae will admit, he’s not half bad for a lanky old geezer who looks sometimes like a strong breeze might topple him. 

They do not reach 160 beats per minute until early October, over a month into the school year. And it’s been an exceedingly dull year so far; first year is exciting, Mae has concluded, because you’re not sure of anything, and every class is a potential for something unexpected and extraordinary to happen, but once you’re a second year you pretty much know all the routines and schedules, and what to expect of every professor. So there’s no real chance of excitement until third year when electives and official Hogsmeade weekends come along, unless you’re one of the rare second years good enough to make it onto the quidditch team. Malcolm is, to her surprise; he lands reserve as a beater for Ravenclaw, and Valerie gets reserve keeper. Which means all they talk about now is quidditch, and they’re consistently ditching her for practice or scrimmages, which leaves Mae with Marian… who she is on decent terms with… and Christine… who she is very much not on decent terms with.

The fact that Christine even came to Dueling Club is astonishing; Mae would have expected her to go on about how it’s not ‘ladylike’ or that her parents have ‘forbidden it’- they seem to forbid a lot of things, but she and her lout of a brother are always there. Fortunately, Mick stays on one side of the gallery with his obnoxious friends, and Christine stays on the other with some hanger-ons who are all googly-eyed over her ‘famous hero father’, and Mae usually finds a space in the middle, where she can keep an eye on Carmody. Unfortunately, Carmody has yet to do anything more villainous than forcing them all to polka at one miserable meeting. 

But when 160 beats per minute happens, there is a general clamor of excitement, because finally, finally, they’re going to get to actually fight each other- only, no, they’re not, because Carmody refuses to let them duel until everyone can cast a decent shield charm. Agneza Gavran gets so fed up at that she nearly quits right then and there, but Minerva McGonagall talks her into staying, even if she looks just as infuriated she can’t show off just yet. Maybe this is why Malcolm didn’t join Dueling, Mae thinks critically, so he wouldn’t have to put up with his ‘I’ve been studying the French-Korean hybrid casting technique, Professor, perhaps I could demonstrate it to the class?’ older sister.

Another reason to be glad she hasn’t got any siblings herself. Except maybe she does. The thought stuns her. She could. If her father is still alive and out there somewhere, well, he could be married to anyone, couldn’t he? And have any number of children. She pictures smaller versions of herself crying in their nappies, or running around a sunny garden somewhere, and then shuts it out. It makes her uncomfortable. Part of her, however horrible might be, is hoping that even if her dad really isn’t FW Shelby, that he’s still dead. Not because she wants him dead but because- at least then it would make sense, why Mum might lie, and Mae wouldn’t… Mae wouldn’t have to wonder about meeting him anymore. 

Her shield charm is coming along very nicely, for what it’s worth. 

As is her ‘apprenticeship’ at the infirmary.

Still, it’s not as if Amell would be letting her do much in terms of magic either, which is what she tells Malcolm, who seems oddly jealous that she’s allowed in there in the first place. Mae would ask if he could help out too, but then he’d have to be her accomplice, which would be one accomplice too many. She has Marian, doesn’t she? Only Marian hasn’t asked her, and Mae hasn’t volunteered any further information, because what is she going to say? ‘Oh, by the way, I think Christine’s dad and our Defence professor are corrupt and working for the evil Minister, and also my mum’s been lying to me about who my father is for my entire life and I don’t know why?’

Maybe part of her is afraid Marian will see something she’s missed. 

Her first real window of opportunity emerges during the first quidditch match of the term, in the third week of October. Mae’s gradually wormed her way into dropping by for a little while most Saturday mornings as well, not just Friday afternoons, and there’s a very nasty spill from a leaking cauldron someone had hauled in, and Amell’s supposed to be present at all quidditch matches in case of serious injury, so they don’t have to carry them all the way up from the pitch, and she’s frazzled, and peevish, and Mae offers to clean up, even grabs Amell her cloak and purse for her. And snatches her office keys from the purse while she’s at it. 

For an instant she’s sure Madam Amell saw her swipe them, but then Amell just thanks her and hurries off, none the wiser, leaving Mae with a mop, a bucket, an absurdly foul smelling puddle to clean up, and the keys to the office. The office, which Mae has been in dozens of times by now, where everything has its place, everything is neatly preserved and labeled, from magazines to specimen jars to correspondence- every single time Amell receives a letter, she saves it, puts it in its correct place and closes her filing cabinet back up. Mae supposes she must have worked out the system so she has a backlog of everything and never wishes she’d kept a letter or note she threw out, especially if it’s from another healer, but honestly, Mum could take notes from her. In comparison her office is a bloody mess, and Mae’s seen her burn loads of letters. 

Mae cleans up the potion spill, quickly, then rushes over to double check that the main infirmary doors are locked. The last thing she needs is someone walking in on her snooping. Any professor will still be able to open them, but most of them are down at the quidditch pitch. Mum especially will be; Hufflepuff is playing Gryffindor today. Mae initially worried that Amell might say something to Mum about Mae volunteering in the infirmary, and maybe she has, but if she has, Mum hasn’t said anything to Mae about it, so she must not be that suspicious. Or maybe she just doesn’t really care what Mae does, so long as she’s ‘staying out of trouble’. Mae had expected her to throw a fit and try to ban her from Dueling Club, since it means she’ll be around Carmody even more, but she hasn’t said a word about that, either.

She tests the knob one more time, then doubles back, skirting around the wet spot on the floor, and makes for the office. The key slides neatly into the lock, and then she’s inside. Granted- there is no guarantee that Amell has kept any letters as far back as 1945. For all Mae knows, she tosses everything over a year old. But she referenced Mum’s supervisor writing to her, and that makes Mae think maybe she’s reread that letter once or twice, out of curiosity or concern. She’d have been worried about Mum, wouldn’t she, if she heard Mum had gotten- well- up the duff by some bloke?

Mae carefully shuts the heavy door behind her, then makes a beeline for the big metal filing cabinet, her shoes squeaking across the floor. It’s alphabetized, and she’s not sure what letter it might be filed under… R, maybe, for Relief Services? Lucky guess. Mae yanks out the corresponding folder and sets it down on Amell’s neat desk, flipping open pages and pages of yellowed letters, correspondence and recommendation letters and faded postcards and photos… There’s one small one, taken outside the Hogsmeade train station. Mae squints, and can just make out Mum standing stiffly in the back, smile all but stapled on, looking as if she wants to be anywhere but there. She spots Teddy and Patsy too, shockingly young, and a few other wannabe healers and mediwizards, baby-faced and beaming proudly. She keeps flipping through letters, peering through the cursive for any trace of ‘Amy’ or ‘Benson’.

Finally, towards the very back of the folder, she finds a few. The first is a general letter of recommendation as to why Mum would be a good fit for the program, certified by Lucinda Amell and Kalliope Witherspoon. It’s very boring, basic stuff- compassionate, responsible, mature for her age, resourceful, used to hardships due to her upbringing- etc. The second is from a healer named William Bones to Madam Amell. This must be the letter that Amell referenced. Mae reads it with a sort of sick, churning feeling in the pit of her stomach. It is dated from early December, 1945.

 _Lucinda_ ,

_Apologize for the abruptness, but haven’t got much time. Rest assured we are all well and accounted for. No significant problems as of late beyond shit roads and a traumatized population. Concerns about Benson is why I’m writing. Pregnant- examination was done by Hollander, don’t worry. She estimates twenty one weeks. Benson girl not forthcoming in the least. Conception date puts it at late June- so either back home or in Lille. Asked around, but you know how these kids cover for each other. Personally, I suspect a consequence of a last minute bon voyage with a boyfriend? We were only in Lille for five days, seems unlikely. Asked directly whether the father should be notified back in England, she stormed out. Regardless Benson has been informed she cannot continue her work with us past the new year, and she will need to pay for her own travel home. Agreed not to mark it up on her file- seems a shame. Will advise._

_Regards,  
William Bones_

Madam Amell has underlined ‘boyfriend’ and written in blue ink two small sets of initials above it, as if taking her own notes. _M.A.? T.R.?_

The second is from mid January, 1946. It’s from her mother.

 _Dear Madam Amell_ ,

_I am writing in reply to your last letter. Thank you for your concern but I want you to know I am fine and have somewhere to stay. Will not be returning to UK anytime soon. Saul Sabath, a healer we worked with near Toulouse, has agreed to let me stay at his clinic in Gibraltar for the duration. My due date is March 24th. Healer Bones and Healer Hollander have been very kind to me, given the circumstances, and I apologize for any worry on your part. I also would like to apologize for wasting this opportunity you gave me. I am sorry I could not finish out my time in France but I hope I made at least some small difference while I was there. Thank you again for your support._

_Best wishes,  
Amy Benson_

In the margins of this letter, Amell has written, _Sabath - from 1935 conference- poisons specialist_. Then, almost humorously, _Lovely fellow_. 

That is all there is. Mae puts the letters back in order with clammy hands, closes the folder, sets it back in the drawer. She knows both an M.A. and a T.R. who her mother went to school with, after all. M.A. must be Mr. Abbott, Matthew Abbott, that auror who got killed back in April. He used to send them Christmas cards from him and his wife, then their baby girl. Mum always said they were just friends who’d played quidditch together and were both prefects. And T.R… Well, she knows who that is, too. 

She leaves the office, her legs suddenly shaky, as if she’d been kneeling on them for too long. Locks the door behind her. Amell must have had some reason to suspect it could be either one of them. Obviously she never did anything about it- maybe she thought it was really none of her business, which it isn’t, but in private, clearly she had good reason to think that- that if anyone back here could have- could be- Mae is suddenly glad she had a very light breakfast of toast and orange juice. She doesn’t feel good, and her face is strangely hot. 

Maybe Amell changed her mind and decided she’d misinterpreted things when Mum came back and explained away Mae’s father as a muggle soldier. Maybe she decided she’d leapt to conclusions, that she was wrong to assume, that Mum really had just met someone at random, and- and-

Mae doesn’t want to be here anymore. She goes to the library. 

Two faces are prominent in her mind. One is from the photograph they used of Matthew Abbott in the news story. He is smiling proudly at the camera in his dark blue auror’s uniform, hat slightly askew. He had wavy auburn hair, brown eyes, a strong nose and a thick neck, a dash of freckles across his dimpled cheeks. He wasn’t ‘traditionally handsome’, she supposes, but he looked nice, and warm, and friendly. She imagines her own smile, her own face, searching for some trace of him, some secret code that will unlock the truth.

The other face is one she’s seen far more often, and up close, too. That face is paler, and thinner, and the cheekbones are hard and sharp, the nose narrower and longer, the hair dark and slicked back, not a strand out of place. That face doesn’t smile warmly, ever. Not in the yearbook photos that she’s flipping frantically through now. Not in all those glowing articles in the Daily Prophet. Not ever. When it does smile, it is poised, and slick, and charming, lips stretched wide over perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. The eyes are dark and cool, veiled, not open and disarming. Except in just one photograph. Mae finds it with dreadful ease, as if her fingers know just what glossy page to flick to by instinct. 

Slug Club, 1942.

The beauty of magical photographs is that you can look at them dozens of times, and every time, they’re never quite the same. It’s the one from that small, private party, although clearly not so private as to ban photography. Mae can almost hear the mechanical click of the camera, decades ago, in the back of her head, muffled by the din of teenage chatter and faint music. For some reason in her head it’s the Lindy Hop. The last time she glanced over this photo, they were standing in front of a bookshelf, talking. They still are, but it feels different, somehow, looking at it now. Mae sees a trace of something horribly familiar in the way they’re positioned, the way they’re looking at each other. 

Something- she doesn’t know the word for it. Just… happy to be around each other, but not- not the way she is happy to be around, say, Malcolm, or Ambrose, or Valerie- it’s- it’s not just companionship, or comradery, or friendliness. It’s not the polished allure of one of her films, either, it’s not Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, it is disturbingly… normal. And common. And intimate. Mum is smiling at him like it’s just them in the room, like the rest of the photograph doesn’t even exist. He is leaning almost casually against the bookshelf with one hand, gesturing with the other, his head bent down towards her so she can hear him better, no doubt, and it is just-

It is just that-

Mae closes the book as quickly as she’d opened it, and goes back to the infirmary so she’ll be there after the match when Amell returns, to slip her keys back in her purse before she notices she’d ever lost them in the first place.

Ambrose Bulstrode is at Dueling Club the next afternoon, to her surprise. To be honest, she’d thought him far too lazy to join, since he already plays quidditch and everything, and that’s mostly because the Slytherin captain peer pressured him into it. Apparently peer pressure works best on Slytherins because they hate being the odd man out. “Going to whinge about having to jinx girls again?” she asks, more nastily than she meant to.

“No,” he mutters. “Besides, we’re not doing that yet, are we? I had to be here. My cousin’s coming to visit, and if she finds out I’m not in Dueling Club after I promised Father I’d join, then it’ll be my head on the chopping block.”

“Your cousin?” Mae scoffs. “Who’s she, an exchange student?”

“No,” he snorts. “You know her- you were at the wedding!”

Mae’s heart sinks, a vision of a blushing young bride in floral patterned white swimming across her mind’s eye. “Oh,” she says, rather stiltedly. “That one.”

“He’s put her on some kind of committee,” Ambrose continues, boredly. “And I suppose they’re going to inspect the school and all, throughout the semester. Starting today.”

Mae wants to ask further questions, but Carmody is getting everyone’s attention, arms folded under her chest as she surveys their unruly ranks. “Seeing how we all seem to have managed a shield charm that doesn’t have the consistency of a vanilla wafer,” she says, archly, “I think we can begin our dueling today. Pair up.”

Ordinarily Mae would be thrilled, but she hasn’t been able to do much but worry since yesterday. Ambrose misinterprets it as nerves over something else entirely. “Don’t worry,” he says, reassuringly. “Your knock-back jinx is actually quite good, and I’ll go easy on you-,”

“Shut up,” she snarls, as they separate by ten paces.

He scowls. “We’d better be meeting for tutoring after this. You know that quiz we’ve got in Transfig tomorrow? I only got a 64 on the last one, so-,”

The metronome begins to tick.

He sends a half-hearted hex her way. Mae’s shield deflects it easily, and she tries to disarm him, even if that’s very advanced for a second year and she’s never actually pulled it off before. He just laughs instead when the weak arc of red light tickles at his fingers. That makes her all the more angry. Her next spell is a vicious slash of her wand; he jumps back, startled, sends back a shower of sparks her way.

“Come on!” Mae snaps, incensed he isn’t taking this seriously, incensed about what she knows- or doesn’t know, she thinks desperately, or doesn’t know, it’s not proof, it’s just speculation and rumors, it’s not real, hard evidence-

“Calm down,” he retorts, then adds, sullenly, “You know, only a girl would throw a fit when you try to hex her, then throw a fit when your hex doesn’t land-,”

“Locomotor!” she jabs her wand at him; he narrowly dodges, not even bothering to deflect, and that infuriates her all the more, his snickering, why isn’t he taking this seriously, why is he laughing, doesn’t he understand it’s not just a game, it’s not-

“Wingardium leviosa!”

Her wand floats out of her grasp; stunned at his use of the most basic of charms in their very first duel, Mae just watches it for a moment, and then, as Ambrose snorts, watching her wand float towards him, Mae rushes forward, snaps, “Accio!” Her wand doesn’t soar back into her hand, but it’s powerful enough to break his simple spell, and it clatters to the floor. Mae scoops it back up, only to bump into Ambrose, who is suddenly very close and very wide-eyed.

“What did you just say?” he says, voice low against the background din of shouted spells and loud arguments, mediated by Carmody as she moves from pair to pair, high heels clacking in time with that stupid metronome.

“I cast a summoning spell,” Mae snaps, “ever heard of it?”

“No,” he says, brow furrowed. “Not in English, you didn’t.”

She freezes. “What?”

“I said,” he glances around almost nervously, moves a little further away from the rest of the group, Mae reluctantly following. “You didn’t cast it in English. You- you speak Parseltongue?”

Mae stares, then barks, “No I don’t!”

“Yes, you do.” Ambrose looks like he’s not sure whether he should be alarmed or impressed. “I- I thought that was impossible. I mean, you’re a muggleborn.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mae demands, trying to hide the fact that her hands are shaking by shoving them into her trouser pockets. “So what, I’m a muggleborn-,”

“Everyone knows only descendants of Slytherin himself can speak it,” Ambrose sounds… almost reverent, upon uttering Slytherin’s name. “It’s not- it’s not something you just pick up, Mae! Is your mum sure she comes from muggles? Because maybe- I don’t think that’s possible, she has to have some powerful magic in her bloodline-,”

Mae’s heart is in the bowels of her belly, ticking away like that metronome. “My mum’s got nothing to do with me speaking- if I could speak Parseltongue,” she amends, “which I can’t, by the way, you should get your ears checked-,”

Ambrose ignores her. “Mae,” he says, baffled. “It runs in bloodlines. In families. It’s not like- it’s not spontaneous, not like how some people are just- are just seers, for example. It has to be inherited from someone.” He all but gleams with interest. “So can your mum speak it too?”

No, she cannot. But Mae knows someone who can. 

“I don’t feel good,” she says.

Ambrose is still prattling on, delighted with this newfound information, like he just found out she’s secretly a millionaire or something. 

“I have to go.”

She breaks away from him and runs out of the gallery, the doors swinging shut behind her, only to be forced to skid to a halt as she passes through the antechamber, where Headmaster Dippet stands at the base of the grand staircase, chatting away with a group of severe looking witches and wizards all in their Sunday best, all over sixty, save for one young woman, who is standing a little apart with her neck craned back, taking in the high ceilings and moving staircases and the Fat Friar arguing outside the Great Hall with the Grey Lady with interest.

LYDIA

Lydia distinctly recalls the tantrum she’d thrown on her eleventh birthday, when her letter to Hogwarts had arrived and been promptly confiscated by her mother. She remembers working herself up into a feverish pitch of shrieking and shaking, smashing anything within reach, stomping her feet on the soft carpeting, clawing at her mother’s arms and neck in an attempt to rip the letter away, and finally being reduced to hoarse, angry sobs when her aunt tore her away and frog-marched her into her bedroom, locking the door behind her. 

“Lydia,” she can still hear Therese saying through the thick door, through her teeth. “You are ill. You are fragile. And you cannot control yourself. You would be miserable there, and they would send you right back home. I promise, I will still teach you here, and your father will hire tutors, and in time, you will get your wand. But you need to calm down. You need to show us you can be mature about this. Does a lady pitch a fit when things don’t go her way?”

In response, Lydia had hurled the heaviest thing she could pick up, an ornate gas lamp, at the door, and watched it shatter, then punctuated the ringing silence with another scream of rage. “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!” she remembers howling, and watching with hysterical pleasure as two angry lumps on her scalp sprouted into horns, and her skin thickened and hardened like cured leather, and angry, itching scales burst out across the back of her neck. She raked girlish fingernails turned monstrous claws down the wood of the door, hissed and spat and cursed, broke off the fragile horns with her own gnarled hands, threw them on the floor, and crushed them under her patent leather shoes until they were dusty grey powder. 

She was not a lady, she remembers thinking, lying in a huddled lump on the floor in front of her full length mirror. She was not. She was a witch and she wanted to go, she wanted to go, and the moment she got her hands on a wand she was going to make them sorry they’d ever been born. She’d emphasized this by pummeling the rug with her hands and feet every few minutes, lest they think she’d tired herself out, and had eventually dozed off hours later, throat hoarse and swollen from all her screaming and wailing, knuckles scraped open and fingers smarting. 

Hogwarts featured in her dreams prominently after that, less a castle and more an entire fantastical kingdom, one waiting for its lost princess, holding vigil every night, longing for her triumphant return to a place she’d never been. That was how it happened in all the stories. She was the princess and they would love her even if she were ugly and grotesque and they would lead her by the hand through the hallowed halls and there would be masquerade balls every night but she’d never have to disguise herself as anyone but Lydia, Lydia with her burned skin and limpid brown hair and dull brown eyes, Lydia who was not what she should have been, could have been, but was still who they wanted, who they loved.

But those were a child’s fantasies, obviously, and she’d grown out of them. Seeing Hogwarts now brings no sudden thrill of excitement to her, doesn’t unlock some inner child, teary-eyed with joy and awe. It’s just a school. She’s been to old castles and keeps before, has seen far more impressive architecture, more sprawling gardens, more vivid scenery. It’s just an old derelict castle on a hill overlooking a ramshackle little village, an ugly lake, and a brooding forest full of monsters. She doesn’t let herself fall into the trap of reminiscing about a life that never was. She won’t poke at that old wound any further. 

Tom left her no specific itinerary or instructions, to her mild surprise. Lydia is not a fool. She’s well aware he has ample reason to want eyes and ears inside the castle, and while as Minister he could insist on a visit at any time, he clearly feels that the Board of Governors will draw less attention and less suspicion than if he were to randomly show up for an audience with the Headmaster. At dinner last night- the first time they’d ate together in over a fortnight, she might add- he’d ignored her more prying questions and had simply remarked that Dippet would adore her, and that ‘even’ Dumbledore might find her charming. 

Lydia has never been sure what, precisely, Tom has against his old Transfiguration professor, but perhaps it’s just a general unease. Dumbledore is commonly regarded as one of the most powerful warlocks in Europe. He’s not an enemy one wants to have, for all of his apparent disinterest in politics and tendency to lock himself amongst his books and research. Still, Tom didn’t seem overly concerned, in her view. His good mood has continued since the summer, even if he is seldom home, particularly in the evenings. 

She assumes it has to do with the fact that his legislation regarding the Statute has finally broken free of the committee death spiral, and is about to be up for an actual vote. The economy is on an uptick. Unemployment is low. The birth rate among wizards continues to skyrocket. Those are all the sorts of things that might please a consummate politician. After dinner, he’d even made a very mild attempt at seduction, although it hadn’t gotten any further than some heavy petting, as if they were two sixteen year olds who’d snuck off during a party. Not that Lydia knows much about that. She was rarely left alone at that age. If Therese was not chaperoning her, Lyle was. Her encounters with the opposite sex (who weren’t already related to her) were sparse indeed. 

He’s not a bad kisser, though, and he is far less stiff than one might initially assume; she’d thought it’d be like trying to cozy up to a mannequin, but he was far more willing to give as much as he received when the lights were off. At one point she’d naturally assumed they were going to move to the bedroom, but he’d seemed to lose interest- or simply decide against it- and his attentions had turned more calculated than consuming. She dislikes it very much when he kisses her on the forehead. It makes her feel like a child sat on some adult’s knee. It feels oddly final, like some sort of goodbye, or congratulations. 

She hadn’t bothered to demand specific reasons as to why they haven’t gone any further. She finds him attractive in the sense that she finds certain articles of clothing attractive and wants to feel them against her skin. She isn’t inflamed with desire at the sight of him, doesn’t get nervous butterflies when he smiles at her, doesn’t cast longing glances his way when he turns his back to her. She imagines he would quite like to think she secretly pines for him, and of course she can put on a good show of girlish disappointment when he leaves, but there’s no real meat to it.

It’s fine, of course. What she wants has never been anyone’s first priority and she’s used to attending to what is expected of her first and foremost. 

And it’s not as if she’s spent these past few months languishing around the house like some purloined maiden waiting for a rescue from her tower. Tom obliged her loneliness in letting Kit come over most weekends, and Lydia obliged her curiosity by insisting Kit help her break into his study, which she is forbidden in all but words to enter. Any clumsy attempts on her own would have immediately alerted him, and while Lydia has seen him annoyed before, she hasn’t really seen him angry yet, and doesn’t really wish to see that directed at her, either. But elfin magic is different and beyond the purview of most wizards, no matter how skilled they think they are. It didn’t take much effort on Kit’s part to get them inside.

The contents were disappointing, mostly. He’s obviously not stupid enough to keep anything truly incriminating at his home, just in case someone manages to get a warrant someday, and she couldn’t make sense of many of the letters and documents she came across, either because they’d been encrypted with runes, because she didn’t understand any of the references, or because she was in a rush. The only thing of note she discovered was that he is almost certainly a Parselmouth, because he’s written out attempts to make a lexicon of sorts in the language. It doesn’t appear to be going very well; a linguist he is not. One only needs to listen to his French to know that. 

But Tom sees nothing wrong with coming home without warning, and did catch her out once making a horrific mess of the kitchen with Kit on a Saturday evening, trying to bake a tart. He hadn’t been angry, exactly, but just the sight of Kit tends to put him a little on edge, and he hadn’t been pleased with the mess, and had been even less pleased to see her with flour on her face and her hair askew, ineffectually sweeping crumbs off the counter.

What was truly interesting, Lydia had thought, was that he couldn’t quite understand why she’d want to do something as mundane as attempt to bake a tart in the first place. The sight of her unpolished and almost common looking had seemed to unnerve him slightly. She’s got no idea why; if his very first fling was with a girl who looked more like a farmhand than a debutante, one would think he might be attracted to some sort of floundering attempt at Suzy Homemaker. It didn’t really matter, one way or another. She’d showered and freshened herself up and Kit had been gone by the time she made her way back downstairs, the kitchen immaculate and dinner already laid out on the table. They’d eaten in perfect silence. 

That, at least, has always been familiar to her. Lydia is used to eating in silence. It’s a very mechanical exercise, staring at the wallpaper and carefully selecting one thing after another, chewing, swallowing, clearing your plate bit by bit. Often, he finishes before her, makes brief small talk, and leaves the table. Having to clear it is a new experience for her, since there’s no one to help, and no elves to leave it to. She dropped a plate a month into their marriage, and had heard him pause on the stairs, and had been struck by a sense of clawing, primal terror, as if she were ten again. 

She does not know why. He has never been violent with her, never even raised his voice to her, never threatened her or cursed at her or made her feel as though he might harm her in any way. But it had lit up some nerve that saw her flatten herself against the door frame of the kitchen and sink down onto her haunches against some invisible foe, convinced he was about to come back down the stairs, see her like this and the broken plate, a ruined wedding gift, and punish her for it. But he’d continued upstairs, having seen neither, and she’d fixed the plate and put everything in the sink to soak and then washed her hands with scalding water several times, to snap herself out of it. 

Now, standing in Hogwarts’ grand antechamber, she takes in the flickering torches, the grinding of the stairs, the murmuring ghosts darting to and throe, and beyond a dull pang here or there, she shuts it out. She isn’t here to feel sorry for herself. It’s just a school. She casts her gaze around the chamber once more, and takes in the sight of a small figure hurrying towards the open doors leading out onto the grounds. Then blinks. Is that- the girl is gone as quickly as she emerged, a dark-haired figure in muggle clothes, not uniform, since it is a weekend, after all. Her next visit will be on a schooldays, so she can see how classes operate. For now, a tour. 

Whether she happened to lay eyes on Amy Benson’s child doesn’t really matter, she supposes, but what Lydia can’t quite work out is whether or not Tom believes Lydia knows the truth of the matter. Whatever that truth may be. It’s quite simple. Either the child is his, or it isn't’. If it is, she can’t imagine why in Merlin’s name he would be comfortable letting the mother take up a position working closely with Dumbledore. He can’t be that moronic, blinded by sentiment or not. And Amy Benson does not seem the type who would have been amenable to making private vows of secrecy and loyalty, and if she’d been paid off to keep her mouth shut, surely that would have involved not coming back here with her daughter at all. Perhaps Tom genuinely does not care, and is only willing to do something about it if it becomes a pressing concern, if he thinks there is genuine risk of it becoming public knowledge. Lydia thinks he underestimates the always churning magical gossip mill. 

Or perhaps this is some long-winded ploy of his, and he thinks he is going to use his unwitting, naive little wife to spy on his former lover and potential bastard child, with none of them any the wiser. That almost makes Lydia want to laugh. She may have only spoken to Amy Benson once, but the woman is certainly no fool, and more importantly, does not seem the sort to suffer fools. Oh, that must have driven Tom mad, once upon a time. She was probably quite difficult for him to manage, when she was angry. Not easily won over with a brilliant smile or a few soft compliments, that one. No, she probably yanked him down to her level plenty of times, really let him have it, and no doubt that infuriated him. Or maybe it was part of the appeal. Lydia won’t pretend to understand him, half the time.

And that stupid gala. She should have insisted on attending with him. At least then she’d have gotten the chance to see how they interacted around each other, if it was loathing or fear or badly repressed desire or mutual shame and guilt. Well, guilt on his part might be a bit of a stretch, perhaps. Is he trying to test Lydia, see how she reacts in the presence of his- whatever Amy Benson might be to him? But he isn’t even here himself, although she supposes old Castor Mulciber will be reporting right back to him, he’s always been Tom’s inside man on the Board.

Well, two can play that game. Oughtn’t he to worry about her, once in a while? What she might do? What he might provoke of her?

The tour takes nearly half the day, and it’s pushing four o’clock in the afternoon by the time they’ve examined every corridor, empty classroom, common room, and courtyard. After a while they all begin to blur into one big expanse of weathered stonework and leering gargoyles. Not to mention the hundreds upon hundreds of moving statues and paintings. It is a little overwhelming, Lydia will admit. Even the question of her sneaking off like she did in Paris is a moot point. She’d be immediately lost; it will take her more than one visit to properly familiarize herself with the castle. 

They haven’t seen very many professors, though, just plenty of students. Dippet had them stop and chat briefly with Sidney Finch, who teaches Astronomy, and with Kalliope Witherspoon, who teaches Charms, but seems reluctant to go knocking on any office doors. It’s on the tip of Lydia’s tongue to wheedle her way into an audience with Benson, but she doesn’t want to come across as too obvious or overt. Better to let it happen naturally. They have plenty of time here this semester, and the last thing she needs is Tom getting it into his silly head that she is on some one-woman crusade, wife against mistress, duel to the first blood. Instead she inquires, very innocently, if she might have a few minutes to speak with her darling little cousin Ambrose. That, at least, is all truth. There’s no ulterior motives here. Lydia quite likes Ambrose. He is refreshingly open, for someone in her family, and he is at heart, beneath the hulking exterior, a sweet-natured little boy who just wants to please his mother and father. 

That, perhaps, strikes a hard chord with her.

Dippet is all too accommodating, and shortly thereafter she is sitting in the quiet Slytherin common room, which is about as stately and old-fashioned as she’d expected, with some obvious Roman influences, given the marble columns and the gleaming tiled floors. The murky light of the lake casts an eerie pallor over the room, and it is damnably chilly. Lydia burrows into her coat, and smiles reassuringly at Ambrose over the cup of tea clasped in her hands. He smiles uncertainly back, unsure if she is still his fun older cousin now that she’s gone and gotten married to a stranger. 

“Don’t worry,” she says in a mock stage whisper, “I’m not here to report back to Mummy and Daddy about your marks in Transfiguration or Potions, cuz.”

He laughs a little at that, then scowls; Ambrose has never been one to hide how he feels- “Father won’t get off my back about Dueling. Can’t you tell him I have enough to worry about- I’ve got Slytherin practice three times a week, and loads of homework on top of that!”

“He just wants you to put your good stature to use,” she teases, poking him on the shoulder, and he winces but nods.

“I know. It’s just- it is an awful lot, Lyddie. I mean, I’m only in second year, and they’re acting like it’s the end of the world if I’m not the best at everything.”

“They’re just very proud of you,” she says, “and you’re their only child, and they want you to do well and be successful. Is that so bad?”

“No,” he mutters. “I suppose not.”

“How has your dueling been going, then? Professor Carmody’s running that, isn’t she?” Lydia rather likes June Carmody, and it’s a shame she couldn’t make the wedding. Arthur is a bit of a wet rag, but June rather punches up the place, and Lydia likes the scandalized reaction she gets- “She sits like a man!” she can hear her mother hissing in her head already. “No sense of decorum! Typical halfblood!” 

Besides, Lyle’s told her she’s the first and only woman they’ve let into the Knights of Walpurgis, which means she really must be something extraordinary. Or perhaps they just wanted to incense Applewhite, not that it matters. Neither of them are on the official member’s list, smeared by their muggle blood and love marriages. She can still recall the scandal when Applewhite came back from that muggle war with that muggle wife, as her father would say. His lack of purity could have been overlooked, he was charismatic and talented enough, but then he had to go and marry some Pole. 

She almost doesn’t hear what Ambrose says next, sullenly. “-be better if my partner wasn’t always stomping off-,”

“Your partner?” Lydia scoffs. “Like a dance partner? Oh my, do we have a little crush?”

“No,” he says, wrinkling his nose. “That’s not- it’s just Mae.”

Oh Morgana’s withered teats. Did he just say-

“Mae Benson?” she asks, innocently. “That professor’s daughter?”

Ambrose blanches, as he’s now broken one of the cardinal family rules, and revealed some sort of friendly connection, however mild, to a non-pureblood. “I- it’s not like that,” he says, “I mean- oh, don’t tell my mum, come on, Lydia, we’re not- she tutors me, I mean it isn’t as if we’re great friends, and-,” he fumbles- “honestly, she’s not even that muggleborn, you know?”

“How so?” Lydia arches an eyebrow, keeps her tone just chilly enough to make him worry she might actually rat him out to his parents.

Ambrose glances around, leans a little closer. “Look,” he says, “don’t- don’t tell anyone, but she’s a Parselmouth. Imagine? I thought only a few families inherited that from Salazar, but- she’s not even a Slytherin! Isn’t that wild? But she has to be at least a halfblood, then. You know. She has to have some pure magic in her.”

Pure magic indeed. Lydia isn’t sure whether to smile or scream. She reassures Ambrose that all his secrets are safe with her, says her goodbyes, smiles and holds her tongue through the remainder of the visit, makes small talk with Valeria Carrow until it’s time to go, and is back home by five o’clock, sharp. She’s in such a state that she doesn’t even realize Tom is home unexpectedly early as well until she’s walked into the parlor. He’s finishing off a letter in front of the fireplace, murmurs a greeting without looking up, then seems to remember where she’s been.

“So how was it?” he asks mildly. “Your very first visit to Hogwarts?”

“Oh, lovely,” Lydia says. “It was wonderful to take a tour of the place- so much history!- and to see all the common rooms… Well, I’ll be back in a few weeks to sit in some classes, so I haven’t made up my mind on anything yet, but I am glad to have seen it with my own eyes, finally.”

“Good,” he says. “That’s… I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.”

“Oh, I did.” Suddenly it has occurred to her that this is a chance, perhaps the only chance she may have in some time, to see if she can make him squirm. He had his fun, on their wedding night, when he let the cat out of the bag about having known all along. Now it’s her turn. If he already knows, oh well. If not- well, it’s worth it, she decides, just to make him dance on her strings for once, and not the other way around. “It does make me wonder, though, if you think it wise…” She trails off with a little sigh. “Well, it’s none of my business, I know, but-,”

He’s on the hook now, all interest in his letter lost, stood up from his seat. “Wonder about what?”

“Well, if you’re sure it’s wise that the girl be educated there,” she says. “You know, should anyone notice any… similarities- of course, she’s hardly your doppelganger, but there are certain traits that might… provoke whispers-,”

“What girl.” It is not a question. The look on his face- oh, this is the best she’s felt in months. For this brief instant, she has all the power here. Lydia finds she very much enjoys it.

“The Benson girl,” she says with a bemused, coy smile. “Cousin Ambrose has it on good authority that she’s a parselmouth, like her father. Says he heard her himself, and really, you know him- he’s a good boy, I can’t imagine why he might lie about such a thing-,”

She stops talking then, because she can’t. That is to say, her mouth is moving, but no words are coming out, at least nothing audible. Lydia’s breath hitches in her throat, and although rationally she knows he’s just silenced her, it’s a basic charm, it doesn’t hurt, she cannot help the unfurling panic. He is not moving at all. He is just standing there, not even looking at her, but past her, slightly, as if trying to solve a very complicated equation in his head. One of his hands is flexing slightly against the leg of his trousers, as if counting off, or restraining himself from making a fist, or just shaking out of nerves.

She blinks hard and restrains the urge to clutch at her throat. She’s not choking, it’s just- the silence is deafening, and then it comes rushing back to her, and she coughs, awkwardly. His gaze snaps back over to her. 

“Tell me again from the beginning,” he says, “exactly what your cousin told you.”

Lydia manages an uneasy smile, wetting her lips with her tongue, swallows hard, and does so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Literally the only thing I can think of that makes duels actually interesting beyond two people standing at opposite ends of a room shouting spells at each other is to make it much more physical, like dancing. Music gets compared to magic in HP canon, so why not here? June is focused on making sure everyone is A. not self conscious about their movements and B. can keep to a beat and move in time with a 'rhythm' be that music or magic. Also, I just think it's fun. 
> 
> 2\. Amell does not have some master plan nor does she know for certain that Mae is any specific person's child- her notes on the letters at the time were innocently meant on her part and just a teacher wondering to herself about a student's personal life. Since she was there for the whole Tom-Amy-Matthew debacle that ended with Matthew in the infirmary, it seemed natural for her to speculate. She doesn't personally care, I don't think, one way or another. I do think it was kind of her at the time to offer Amy support when she found out she was pregnant, though.
> 
> 3\. Mae obviously would have found out one way or another, this sort of thing is like a ticking time bomb, it will go off. But given all her snooping it felt fitting for her efforts to haphazardly pay off, even if she does not get her 'confirmation' until Ambrose clues her in on parseltongue being genetic. Even that, she probably could have found out herself with some digging. Honestly, I think Mae very well could have put two and two together once she brooded on the fact that A. my mother has some serious vested interest in lying to me about my father, almost like she's ashamed of him or me and B. my mother was once good friends with Tom Riddle who I know to be a parselmouth, like myself. We can definitely argue that even Mae might have been interested in denying that to herself for as long as possible, because that's not really a conclusion anyone would want to reach.
> 
> 4\. Ambrose is genuinely an innocent kid who doesn't realize what he just revealed. He doesn't know that Tom is a parselmouth (although there are rumors it runs in the Gaunt line, among other families supposedly descended from Slytherin), but he does know it is something that it seen as almost a 'perk' among purebloods and he is genuinely shocked/excited that Mae might demonstrate these abilities despite nominally being a muggleborn. 
> 
> 5\. Lydia not getting to go to Hogwarts was one of many traumatic parts of her childhood. She tries to clamp down on this by now, as an adult going, 'whatever, it's not that cool anyways, I didn't miss much'. She is also sick of feeling like Tom's plaything and is actively looking for an opportunity to get one over on him. Of course, this would have failed had Tom actually known (or allowed himself to admit) that Mae is indeed his child; he'd just have been like 'yeah, I know, nice try'. In general, she's just trying to get under Tom's skin by using Amy and Mae against him. Unsurprisingly, it works. 
> 
> 6\. Well, the 'Amy's a filthy lying liar who only knows how to lie to me and I am not at all affected by it, and honestly, I have all the power here because I know she's a lying liar' plan isn't turning out so hot, huh Tom? Good thing he will definitely not make any irrational or impulsive decisions based on this new information! Right? 
> 
> 7\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/) if you want to discuss this fic or others.


	28. Tom V - Amy X

LONDON, JULY 1946

“I understand that it was an accident, ma’am,” Tom says calmly. “But you must understand that I’m not the deciding authority when it comes to whether or not the Department of Magical Law Enforcement decides to press charges.” 

The woman sitting in the chair beneath him is near hysterical, and has been since her thirteen year old son and one unfortunate fourteen year old muggle were whisked off to separate wings. It’s not very common that a student comes home for the summer holidays and decides to get even with some old schoolyard bullies, but it doesn’t tend to end well for anyone. In this case, one badly timed hex has led to a muggle bleeding out all over the street, the muggle authorities unimpressed with the official cover-up of ‘knife fight’ in an upper middle class London suburb, and one unlucky young wizard possibly facing expulsion, if not his wand being destroyed permanently. 

He’s been on his feet since six in the morning and it is now two hours past when he should have clocked out, but as this is his case file, he cannot leave the hospital until he at least speaks with a healer. The woman continues to sob beside him; he can’t remember if she’s a halfblood witch or a muggleborn, and he blinks hard in the lamplight- magical hospitals are so much more dim, without the fluorescent lights and white-toned floors and walls- and shifts in his too small leather shoes. A blister is bursting on the back of his left heel; he can feel the hot bead of blood worm its way down. The woman’s wailing is grating, but nothing he hasn’t heard before. 

“He’s a good boy,” she says, looking up at him pleadingly through red-rimmed eyes on a blotchy, tear-streaked face. He struggles to hide his disgust, and hopes it comes across as a grimace of concern, instead. “Really, he is- isn’t there some kind of probationary period, he didn’t mean to- you know they don’t know their own strength, they don’t understand how dangerous a single spell can be, they don’t teach them these things in school-,”

Tom agrees with her there. He struggles to recall anything genuinely useful he retained from Defence Against the Dark Arts. A detailed understanding of the side-effects of the Unforgivable Curses, perhaps. That’s come in handy a few times. Occlumency, of course, he has Merrythought to thank for that. The legilimency was more on his own time; naturally, she was hesitant to venture beyond the basics of any sort of magic so ‘easily abused’, even with a prefect. The woman before him is in such a state that he could take a passing glimpse into her mind and he doubts she’d even notice, but it’s really not worth the trouble.

Finally, a healer in the customary green robes comes out, calling her name, and the woman jumps to her feet, rushing over to her. Tom follows at a much more sedate pace, quill and clipboard at the ready. Expected to make a full recovery… memory charm scheduled for six o’clock this evening, transfer to muggle hospital arranged… He’s so engrossed in his note taking that he doesn’t realize Oliver Parkinson, hero of the hospital, has come into the waiting room until he hears the witches at the welcome desk tittering their greetings. Tom glances up, smiles thinly at Rosie Parkinson’s uncle, a bald man in glasses whose darker shade of green robes indicate the seniority of his position here. 

“Tom,” he says, coming right over, as Tom quickly steps away from the distraught mother and the patient healer explaining things to her. “Sorry to see you here so late in the day. You look dead on your feet.”

“I’ve been better,” Tom says. “You wouldn’t happen to have an employee discount in the canteen? Your teas are absurdly overpriced.”

“I’ll get you the right stuff,” Parkinson claps him on the shoulder jovially, and leads the way to the senior staff break room just down the hall. Tom doesn’t plan to be gone for more than a few minutes, and doubts he’ll be missed. He’s just a faceless government drone to that woman, indistinguishable from any other stiff young man in Ministry robes and a haggard suit and tie underneath. She might even be relieved in his absence. 

And it is nice to have somewhere not a cheaply constructed waiting room chair or bench to sit. 

Parkinson is full of news- it’s a family of gossips he’s part of, and he is no different from Rose or her mother, except that his gossip is strictly relegated to the realm of healing and occasionally potioneers, something Tom isn’t usually especially intrigued by, unless he needs a connection for a poison or a pick-me-up. And he has Abraxas Malfoy for that, most of the time. 

“It’s been hell these past few weeks,” Parkinson recounts, leaning against the stained and cracked counter top with the small sink overflowing with dishes. “All these rookies from the Relief Services flooding in- thinking they know everything because they’ve spent time in the field- time trailing after aurors and hit wizards, mind you, they’ve done more with corpse disposal than any proper healing, believe you me-,”

Tom is not so obvious as to let on an immediate reaction to just the mention of that particular government aid program, but he does ask, after swallowing another sip of freshly steeped tea, “No tales of glory against Grindelwald’s dark forces, is that it?”

“No,” Parkinson says mournfully. “Some interesting tidbits, though- do you remember that letter you asked me to write, for that little friend of yours? Merlin, what was her name- Annie?”

“Benson,” Tom says. It is easier to say her name this way. “Amy Benson.” He keeps no inflection at all. It is just a statement of fact. That is her name. He was here on the day the new healers were due to arrive, waiting. He never saw her. He is trying not to take it for an omen. It would be like her to dawdle, to delay this sort of thing as long as possible. She will be back. She has never been able to keep away for very long before. And he has been so patient, showed such restraint. She doesn’t think he is capable of change but he is. He changes all the time. He can’t remember when he ever stopped changing.

“Right,” Parkinson says, “well, there’s a rumor one of the ones who didn’t come back- you know they lose a few every year, bloody expats, annoying as hell, if you ask me- that one of them wound up with an _unfortunate development_ …” He trails off at the look on Tom’s face. “A pregnancy. I’m not certain it was the same girl, of course, but you know how Bones goes on, and he swore it was one of the muggleborns, and there were only two in this past year’s batch- typical, really. I’m sure you know well enough by now what those girls tend to be like. Very little self respect. Just think on how you might have dodged a jinx, there! You wouldn’t want to be dragged down by that one.”

Tom smiles banally, chuckles along, finishes his cuppa, even puts it neat and tidy in the sink. Walks back out into the waiting room, finishes up his report, escorts the slightly calmer but still harried mother home, promises to be in touch via owl regarding her son’s case. Stands on this ordinary muggle street in the gathering dark, watching traffic whizz by. Finds a darkened alley and apparates back to his small flat. Lets himself in without fumbling his keys, switches on the lights, takes off the dreaded too small shoes and folds his robes for the next morning, loosens and removes his tie, rolls up his shirtsleeves, and sits down at the tiny table in the cramped kitchen, just big enough for two. There is only one chair.

In the next room, he can hear her shushing a baby, murmuring softly in that husky, sleepless sort of voice, pacing back and forth with a bundle cradled in her arms. Or maybe there isn’t one yet. Her sitting on the sofa, hands gently working across a swollen stomach, listening to the heartbeat herself with a stethoscope, taking careful notes each day. Some unknown stranger putting their keys into the door, entering the room, greeting her, sitting down beside her, listening in, crooning and cooing and all those inane things people do when they decide to reproduce. 

He wants to kill it. He doesn’t know what ‘it’ is, specifically- her, the father of this figment of a child, the child itself, some other man’s bastard- he gets up, trying to force out some of the energetic tension in his every limb. He wants to kill the very idea of it. Parkinson might be wrong. Maybe it is just a misunderstanding, a rumor blown out of proportion. But he thinks he could almost envision it. Her upset, confused by what she wants, furious with him, with herself, crawling into bed with the first ingrate who showed her more than a scrap of two of affection, convincing herself it’s just what she needs. 

Like Abbott all over again, but with more permanent consequences. He feels an almost savage spark of triumph. See where it’s gotten her. Alone, afraid, most likely, in pain- he decides to think of something else. She’s forged this path herself and it brought her right off the edge of a cliff. Granted, she could have gotten rid of it by now, but assuming she is this determined to martyr herself on the altar of noncompliance with him, with what they both know is for the best- he could see her carrying it out of spite. Out of rebellion, out of some sick desire to prove to herself that she can do what her mother could not, that is, be a functioning member of society and raise the offspring she’s so carelessly produced. 

He drums his fingers ineffectively on the kitchen counter, then snatches up a plate and cracks it in half with half a murmured spell, a pleasing schism. Tosses it lightly at the wall, and watches it shatter, the pieces cascade to the floor. It’s childish and petty and unbecoming of him but he has precious little left to break. He flicks his wand and watches the plate piece itself back together without so much as a fault line. 

That pervasive, sickening domestic scene invades his vision again. She is rocking a cradle, humming out of tune under her breath, tired but happy, dark circles under her eyes but a contented smile on her face. Someone- not him, never him, isn’t that right, Amy- splays their hands across her shoulder blades and she leans back, at ease, into their embrace, draws them closer, eyes fluttering closed. The nursery flickers grotesquely around them, soft music and soft fabrics and gauzy curtains fluttering in the warm summer wind. 

Tom pictures splitting that in half as he did the plate, shattering it all, ripping the scene away from her play-acting at a normal life without him. He crushes the windpipe of the father without a second thought, caves in his chest until he is little more than a crumpled husk on the floor, approaches the cradle as she screams and keens, on her hands and knees on the floor, begging him for mercy. _It could be yours_ , he imagines her saying, sobbing, really, although he’s never heard her cry like that before. _It could be yours, please, please don’t_ \- He does it anyways. What he does, he’s not sure, because when he pictures the cradle all he can think of is a black void, a tear in reality, a split in the fabric of time, because it can’t be, part of him is still convinced this is some mistake, she’s coming back, she is, she will-

He could do it, he thinks. In a few years he could have enough disposable savings to easily finance a brief trip abroad without getting caught up in the glare of the Ministry’s watchdogs. Wherever she is at present- France, Spain, Italy- it wouldn’t take more than several months, at most, to track her down, especially if she still insisted on working as a healer. An address would shortly follow, it wouldn’t be so difficult, surely to work out her schedule, the security of her home, and then one night, would it be so hard, to simply… be there, waiting for her and whoever- whoever she thought could even begin to replace-

Given a little extra time and resources, he could arrange some sort of tragic accident or disappearance beforehand. That would take even more planning, he might have to wait even longer, but he could- if he truly set his mind to it, he could do it. She would be upset. It would pass. The child- if there is a child, he could- children are so fragile. These things happen. Even magical children are not immune to illness and accidents. In this fantasy, she crumples into his arms, devastated, and he just holds her, silent and present and reassuring that he is not going anywhere. 

Or he could keep it alive. Let her have that. It would be difficult, for him, but eventually it would have to go to school somewhere, and it’d be easy enough to arrange for childcare before that. It would make her more grateful. He would still be a savior. It might be enough, to have her back, even in those conditions. 

He feels a surge of shame, of self-loathing. 

Has he so little self respect? So little spine, that he would even consider raising some- some bastard child with her, with going along with some depraved idea of the perfect little family- mummy, daddy, and baby makes three? It’s absurd. She has betrayed him twice over now. He should want her dead. He _does_ want her dead. He does, he tells himself. He _will_. In time. Once it sinks in. He will want her dead and in a few years, or a little more, once he’s been promoted a few times over, when he has more resources, he will- he will-

The plate drops to the floor and shatters once more. He’ll fix it in the morning. He has no appetite and he’s suddenly very tired. Why does she have to keep disappointing him? He was wrong, to wait. He should have went after her immediately, made her see her mistakes right away. All he’s done is given her more time to make more of them. 

LONDON, OCTOBER 1958

All Hallow’s Eve has not occurred on a Friday for some time, and ordinarily there would be a rash of giddy office parties with cheap punch and pastries, and some tantalizing invitations to more ‘serious’ events, masquerade balls and bonfires and generations of pureblood pride bubbling under the surface for the one night of the year when the Ministry is most likely to smile and look the other way while witches and wizards go rogue. 

Tom has always had mixed feelings about the holiday. As a boy at Hogwarts he genuinely enjoyed the lavish festivities, but it was far less important to him by the time he’d graduated. Sometimes it almost annoys him, the theatrics, pretending as if they really can go back to an earlier era, when the common people lived in terror of a sorcerer alighting from his castle or the witch in the woods stealing their children away. 

It just speaks to a general malaise that’s beset the pureblooded class. Instead of looking to the future, of thinking about how they change their fates, they’re infatuated with gazing fondly back at the past. They can never have that again. They’re blind to it, and for a little while he was too, but ultimately, blood purity is just one cog in the machine. A large, necessary one, but still just a piece of it. He would never have been elected had he catered to the small, elite Sacred Twenty Eight alone, ignoring the plights of those they sneer down at. 

The Knights of Walpurgis is one thing, a sacred organization, and there’s a time and place for that sort of fraternity and discernment. But there is also a place for all the rest, the thousands of halfbloods who are well aware the time will come when they must choose between the magical and the muggle, and nearly all of them will choose the former. It boils down to self-preservation and ego. If offered a silver goblet or a dented tin cup, no one is choosing the tin. It’s not easy to be told how special you are, and choose to consciously deny it in favor of ‘the greater good’.

He doesn’t like this office. It doesn’t lack for space; the desk is massive, the bookshelves expanded- in size, it rivals the headmaster’s office at Hogwarts, but traces of Tuft’s tenure remain; he still needs to have the rugs replaced, and some of the plants she left behind are truly hideous, collecting dust in a corner of the room brimming with artificial sunlight. It still feels like a stage, set for the next act of a play, not something he truly owns, not the way his office with Improper Use of Magic did. 

It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that it is _his_ , not whether he feels at home in it. Still, he has a mind to let Lydia go to town on it when she next visits the office; by now she knows his tastes well enough, and she might enjoy the opportunity to wrest total control of his workspace for a few days. And it might be something of a balm for her wounded feelings; he thinks he restrained himself admirably, in hearing her recount once again what Ambrose Bulstrode told her, but he could tell she was frightened, all the same. Not enough to break her mask, but her pupils had dilated like a deer in the headlights and she’d inched back minutely in her seat, her hands clasped rigidly together in her lap all the while. 

He’d assured her he wasn’t angry with her afterwards, but he knows he didn’t salvage the situation as much as he could have. With any luck, she simply believes his anger was primarily rooted in the confirmation that the child had inherited his parselmouth abilities, but she’s not an idiot, and the idea that Lydia knows he was wrong- that he made a mistake, that he leapt to a faulty conclusion- irritates him. It would be impossible to keep up the facade of perfection at all times within a marriage, but this is more than a little slip-up.

The lump of fury in his throat is hard to swallow around. It’s not all his fault. Was he honestly supposed to believe that she would ever countenance the idea of keeping his child? Her every action during and after that night indicated otherwise. Yes, during the initial months of her absence he’d convinced himself it was a misguided attempt at rebellion, that she was just toying with him once again. 

She’d said she loved him. She’d seemed genuinely contrite, albeit not contrite enough to come crawling back as he’d expected. But after- when he heard of the- what was he supposed to think? Was he supposed to seriously consider that she might just be stubborn enough to not only keep his child, but to raise it away from him, in some of pointed rejection of the life he would have given her- given them? It’s so unceasingly moronic of her and so rooted in her sort of spiteful, childish, stubborn sentiment that he will concede he was careless to dismiss the possibility outright. 

He’s still incredulous, truth be told, and perhaps that’s what is keeping him from doing anything too rash. But Ambrose Bulstrode had no reason to invent such a story, and unless Lydia has concocted the entire thing in some paranoid attempt to trip him up- he thinks of the child who was eavesdropping on him, before the wedding, it had to be a child, and he knows. It was her. That’s why she ran. She could understand what he was saying to the snake. 

And there are certain- he has access to the school photos from the past year, and although her official yearbook picture is just a small black and white snap-shot of a little girl in formal black robes and a pointed hat, he supposes if one were to compare it to a picture of him at that age... The hair, certainly, dark and thick, and there may be something of him in her eyebrows, too, and those high cheekbones and the sharp chin. Her nose is her mother’s; it crinkles up when she smiles, and her light eyes as well. Seeing Amy’s nose on the little girl’s grinning face provokes a disturbing pang of warmth in his chest, which he quickly brushes away.

A second year Ravenclaw. The Hat had made a rather mediocre argument for him in Ravenclaw, once, but he’s always thought it was just testing his argumentative powers. He quickly won it over, all the same, his first real triumph. Slytherin was always, without question, where he belonged. He feels oddly disappointed that it did not place her there as well, but he supposes her mother’s influence explains that. Amy likely stamped out any qualities she found in the least bit reminiscent of him. That outraging thought is much preferable to any disturbing moments of curious affection. 

He has every right to be more enraged with her for this, not less. She hardly denied his accusations; no, she was only too happy to play along, as usual. Scheming and making things up as she goes. It’s a wonder any of her lies have lasted this long. He wonders what she told his child. That he was dead? That he was a monster? Another man entirely? No doubt she came up with something suitably maudlin. She was always the sort who would prefer to keep a child in blissful ignorance rather than dare expose any truths that might have impugned her sterling reputation. Perfect mother and healer, that’s Amy. She must have known it might raise all sorts of unpleasant conversations.

Well, she’s due for an unpleasant conversation or two. Truth be told, all thought of the ring has receded to a dark corner of his mind. He wants to ignore this, to carry on as normal, to assure himself that it doesn’t truly matter, that this changes nothing, but he can’t. How could he? This is different. The ring was one thing. He could tolerate the thought of her keeping it from him for years, because he knew he’d have it back inevitably someday, and it would remain just as it had been when he lost it, preserved, unchanging. This is a living being. A child. Changing and growing is in their very nature. He didn’t just miss out on- on having a child, but years worth of- they could have made it work. 

Obviously, it wouldn’t have been ideal, baby before marriage and all that, but a quick trip to the Ministry and none would have been any wiser. Plenty of early babies followed rushed elopements. It could have been an amusing tidbit, down the line. He wouldn’t have made it out as though she’d ‘trapped’ him. He would have wanted it, the pregnancy, the child. Why wouldn’t he want something half his, half hers? They would have raised it- her- the girl- far better than anyone had bothered to raise either of them. 

He would have had to work hard, and of course Amy’s own career would have been somewhat delayed, but they would have gotten through it, together. What he deserved- what she deserved- what she shouldn’t have taken from him- was that moment of shocked discovery, the happy or upset tears to follow, the tense but ultimately optimistic discussions, the debates over where to live, what to buy, the names, the visits from the midwife, he- he would have been involved, as much as he could be. If she thought he’d be unfeeling, if she thought he wouldn’t want her anymore, if that’s why she didn’t return, once she found out- it’s not true. Of course he would have wanted it. That was all he wanted, the two of them, together, successful and happy. And it would have been a success, the pregnancy. 

Not like her mother’s, ending in some hushed, shameful birth in a backroom of a brothel or some street clinic, not like his mother’s, ending in death, he wouldn’t have let it be like that. Their child would have been born in a clean, well-lit room with trained professionals and she needn’t have suffered and they’d have named her something a good deal more fitting than ‘Mae’- what, did she flip open the newspaper on that day and just read until she found something catchy, Merlin, it sounds like the name of a bloody muggle vaudeville actress- 

That doesn’t matter right now. He exhales forcibly, straightening the papers on his desk. He can’t change the past, much as he’d like to try. He has to contend with the present. The present she made. What she took from him. From her daughter. Didn’t he have a right to be a father? The sort of father neither of them had? He had a right to be there. To be involved. To raise his child. It’s as much his as it is hers. Even more so his, one could argue, given her abilities. He’s sure she’s inherited his talent in other regards. He’s certain she’s intelligent. He’s certain she’s as stubborn as her mother. Didn’t his daughter have a right to a father? The most he can say is that at least Amy didn’t shack up with some unfortunate sod to try to play house these past twelve years. That would have been… extremely troublesome to work around. 

It’s almost better this way. If she thinks she’s untouchable now, just because she’s working behind Hogwarts’ walls, she’s very, very wrong. If she thinks he’s going to sit idly by and grind his teeth and twiddle his thumbs for another twelve years, she’s very, very wrong. It’s just been one deception after another with her, and frankly, he’s rather tired of it. And it’s not as if he hasn’t given her plenty of opportunity to own up to the truth. If she truly felt guilty, she would have confessed it to him that night at Wool’s. She thought he was going to kill her. 

She thought he was going to kill the girl, too. 

The thought is unfortunately unsettling. He knows it was an idle threat. That was the entire point. It was the only way to get her to listen to him. But he wouldn’t have actually gone through with it, even then, believing the girl just some other man’s bastard. He’s not- He wouldn’t have harmed her, she was a useful tool to use against her mother. She still is, just- a tool he has some personal investment in, as well. He’s reserving judgement. There is no sense in getting attached. He doesn’t know the child, and if Amy wanted him to feel overwhelmed with love and fondness for the girl, perhaps she should have reconsidered the past twelve years of poor parenting. 

He glances down at the photograph again. The child smiles obliviously up at him, her hat slightly crooked. He slides it back into its corresponding folder, and tucks it away. He’ll meet her eventually. But he would be lying if some small part of him did not feel oddly relieved. He did leave Amy with something permanent after all, something she obviously could not rid herself of. Something she’s attached her own value to. She loves the child. He doesn’t have to reason that one out, it’s obvious. She all but begged for her daughter’s life, without shame or hesitation. She would, and probably will, do so again. There is nothing she would not do for that girl. He supposes she now understands, oddly enough, how he once felt. 

She will, anyways, if she doesn’t yet. The obvious solution to remove her from Hogwarts would be to manufacture- well, not that he has to stretch the truth very far, there is some admittedly scant evidence of her selling potions ingredients under the table- charges against her and have her removed from the school grounds for interrogation. But it’s too public. It would attract far too much attention in sleepy Hogsmeade, some second-rate journalist like Skeeter would snatch it up, and then it would become a semi-major story, it’s not like they’ve got any wars or crime sprees to write about, thanks to him. 

So he can’t do that. If he wants her, he needs to get her to come to him. Paying a visit to the school himself is not an option. Dippet would be head over heels, but Dumbledore would be on him like a hound on a fox. He doubts the old man would try anything too direct, but he’d never be able to get her alone, it’d be one pathetic game of cat-and-mouse, and he’s tired of that. He could use Carmody, but again, it’s a massive risk to take this early on. Amy isn’t helpless, and Carmody, while skilled, admittedly does not have much experience in that sort of thing- it would escalate into a duel, which June would win, easily, but again, there might be witnesses. 

He can’t use the girl to draw her out because the child is enrolled in the bloody school. He could have Carmody take the girl to lure her, but again, he’s not sure he wants to go down that road just yet. It’d be a horrid mess of memory charms by the end of it, and while Hogwarts has more students than ever before, the disappearance of a second year would still quickly be noted, especially when said girl’s mother is a professor. The last thing he needs is a fucking manhunt. God. The public goes absolutely mad for kidnapping tales. 

He needs to get Amy to leave the school of her own free will. If she becomes aware that he knows the truth, that’s going to be that much more difficult. If she’s still oblivious- well, he can work with that. She’s got a cocky streak. He blames all those years of quidditch. She can be impulsive, and she is arrogant to a degree, so sure of herself at all times, so sure of her little friends… He is working out the tendril of an idea when there’s a sharp knock on his door. He scowls, distracted but says stiffly, “Come in.”

Applewhite troops inside, shutting the door behind him. He does not look pleased. In fact, Tom would wager he’s getting ready to lie about something. Something that he knows will anger Tom. And here he was, thinking there’d be no convenient targets for that fury! Well, what do you know. Michael approaches the desk warily, with the air of an oversized student reporting to the headmaster, dreading the punishment he knows is coming. 

“Michael,” Tom says, not unpleasantly. “And to what do I owe this visit? I thought you had a job in Surrey.”

“There’s been a bit of a problem,” Michael says. Instead of sitting down, he remains standing, large hands in his pockets, blonde head slightly bowed in deference. That’s never easy for someone like Michael Applewhite, who grew up his father’s pride, his mother’s joy, popular and handsome and athletic, a dueling prodigy, a quidditch star. Tom finds he enjoys it more, coming from Applewhite than from some sniveling imbecile like Burke. 

“In what regard?” Tom says, cocking his head ever so slightly.

Applewhite swallows. “I just got a message from Travers, in the DIMC.”

Tom raises an eyebrow. “Bad news?”

“There’s been… reports of Isola in Spain,” Applewhite hedges. 

“Typical,” Tom says. “He couldn’t resist crawling back to the usual haunts, is that it?” Isola is a bit like a cockroach, honestly. He’ll still be scuttling about after the boot’s stepped on and off him, several times, at least. It’s almost admirable, in a perverse, repulsive sort of way.

“There’s… also been an unconfirmed rumor that Slughorn’s been spotted in Madrid,” Applewhite admits. “With… a certain auror. Or at least someone with a striking resemblance.”

“Well,” Tom exhales. “I certainly hope these _unconfirmed rumors_ have very little to do with your failure to produce a body six months ago, Michael. Some singed bone fragments do not exactly an open and shut case make. You’re lucky our standards of evidence are so disgustingly low that we regularly decide murder cases off a leftover fingernail.” He does plan on rewriting most of those law codes, too. Granted it’s worked very well in his favor so far, but honestly. The magical grasp of what comprises ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’ is very, very loose. It’s embarrassing. They can’t have muggles running a better court system than them.

Applewhite stands there like a vaguely distraught sculpture of a Greek hero, watching his fleet burn. 

Silence.

“I take it Slughorn is debating his grand return, then.” Tom says. “Let’s hope he’s decided he wants to be on the right side of history. Why don’t you tell Travers I have a spot open at four, when we’re done here. Travers and I can discuss some polite overtures. Reconciliation. I don’t hate Horace. Really, I wouldn’t be here today without him.” He smiles, but only because he’s thought of something rather useful that could come from this.

Applewhite looks hesitantly relieved. There is something charming in seeing a man so brawny act like a hopeful little boy, realizing he may have gotten away with swiping that last tart off the tray. “Of course. You’re not… I suppose Abbott… there’s many ways we could spin this. They love a lightly damaged hero, the public. And memory charms these days- it should be easy enough, of course, you’ve got people at Mungo’s-,”

“Yes,” says Tom, simply. “I’m glad you came to me about this early, Michael. It speaks to your loyalty. Your trust in the system. I’d hate to think of how… messy this could have become had you hid the truth out of simple cowardice. You’re a good man. Good men own up to their mistakes.”

Applewhite inclines his head. 

“And I should apologize,” Tom says. “I know I’ve pushed you hard, this past year. Kept you away from home. Your wife, your children. How is Eleonora, truly? This can’t be easy for her.”

He doesn’t have to threaten. He just has to dangle it there, like a loose thread, in risk of being snipped away by a judicious pair of scissors. 

“She’s well enough,” Applewhite says, voice tight. “It’s- well, she’s used to getting through it alone. She has the children, in the summers. Harder for her now that Christine’s gone to school, too.”

“Well, you’re a family that perseveres,” Tom says, in that same mild, conversational tone. “And you must be very proud of your children. Lydia tells me that they’ve both enrolled in the Dueling Club. Just like their father.”

“I am,” Applewhite’s square jaw barely moves, as if the words were stuck behind his perfect teeth. “Proud.”

Tom hums in assent. “Well, I’m glad to hear it. You seem like a decent father. A decent husband. It’d be a shame to tarnish that image. I’m sure you try to live up to their expectations. Just as you have mine.” He sighs, as if this isn’t easy for him to talk about. It is. It’s usually quite easy. “Except this one incident, of course. It’s not a total wash-out, but you do understand, I’m sure, that I expect orders to be followed to the letter… not just a rough approximation of the word.” He smiles sharply. 

Applewhite nods. “Yes… sir.” That can’t be easy for him, either, but let it not be said former Gryffindors are incapable of humility, Tom supposes.

“Good,” Tom replies. Stands up. If he does this while seated, Applewhite will rile, might be provoked into doing something stupid, like retaliating. It comes across as too flippant, disrespectful, sneering. He has to maintain a certain level of respect from people like Michael, even when enforcing discipline. It’s all about mutual recognition, to a certain degree. He recognizes Michael’s talents, Michael recognizes his. A pleasing natural cycle. 

“We’ll consider this training for the field,” Tom informs him, stepping out from behind the desk, shrugging off his robes and rolling up his sleeves. “You’re astounding, really. What was it the last time, four minutes you stayed standing?” He whistles lightly under his breath. “Let’s try for a new record, shall we?”

There is a flash of something dangerous in Applewhite’s sky blue eyes. It’s a bit like branding a bull, when you get down to it. He’s three inches taller than Tom, thirty pounds heavier, at least. Without magic, if it came down to a fight, he’d win near every time. With magic…. “Crucio,” Tom says. He doesn’t need to raise his voice or draw it out. His tone is almost questioning, and he barely moves his wand. That helps. The wand tends to set people on edge, wizards or not. If he minimizes his wand movements, they almost feel… less victimized, he supposes. Like they actually stand a fighting chance, as if it’s a battle of wills.

In some ways, it is. This time, Applewhite stays standing, gritting his teeth but otherwise not making a single sound beyond heavy breathing, for four minutes and twenty two seconds. Tom relents just as his knees start to buckle in agony. This isn’t the sort of curse you overdo. You never know when the body is going to produce a kick of adrenaline, and then all of sudden you find yourself being charged out of nowhere because someone’s nervous system had about enough of your interference. Very unpleasant, that is.

He steps back, almost out of respect or some mild deference himself. Applewhite has to brace himself with one white-knuckled hand on the back of the chair to collect himself for a minute or so, but other than that, seems remarkably unfazed. Tom returns to his seat, and waits for him to speak first. This is how you have to operate this sort of procedure. The illusion of control is important. He might be enacting his will on Michael Applewhite, might be forcing him to submit to something painful and arduous, in some regard, but it can never be humiliating, or emasculating, or so shameful that Applewhite feels his pride is wounded. 

He goaded Michael into using the Cruciatus Curse on him, during one of their first meetings. It wasn’t very difficult. Applewhite’s grasp of it at that time wasn’t very powerful, either. It felt more like getting the wind knocked out of him than anything truly agonizing. Tom recovered, wandless, he might add, and imperiused him on his first try, also wandless. Applewhite was more than willing to recognize his superiority after that. Primitive, yes. It’s a few steps above bare-knuckle boxing in some alley, or wrestling in some pit. But it all comes down to the same philosophy, really. Might makes right. Those are the rules Michael lived by long before he ever made Tom’s acquaintance. 

That, and the illusion of control and the illusion of choice. He didn’t corner Michael in some shadowy stairwell. He came here of his own free will, confessed, weighed the consequences beforehand and decided this was preferable to Tom finding out on his own weeks from now. He made the right choice. Tom can forgive. There’s nothing to be gained from a reputation of complete mercilessness. That doesn’t do wonders for anyone’s support of your leadership. It just leads to a complete mess of people lying to cover for themselves, which wastes everyone’s time and energy… This is much more efficient. 

“I’ll let Travers know before I leave today,” Applewhite says, finally. His voice is a little hoarse, but other than that, calm and composed. “Thank you for your understanding, Minister.”

“Of course,” Tom says, tone even, neutral. If he sounds reassuring or even vaguely sympathetic, he instantly loses respect in Applewhite’s eyes. “Thank you for your honesty.”

Applewhite leaves, straightening his tie. Tom turns his attention back to his desk, pulling open a new report from his inbox. He’s still got a long work day ahead of him, and some unexpected planning, too. He could hardly admit it aloud, but Applewhite’s recklessness, leading to Abbott’s survival, really may have been an unexpected boon. He can use a living man much more than he could a corpse, for this particular objective. 

HOGWARTS, OCTOBER 1958

Amy’s not sure what’s gotten into Mae, but whatever it is, it’s not very good. The past week and a half has been a string of intermittent explosions. She’s skipped class twice- once in Astronomy, once in History of Magic, she’s lost Ravenclaw a grand total of twenty points in half as many days, she’s had detention with Beery for starting a fight during Herbology that ended with a group of rowdy twelve year olds throwing fertilizer at each other. The staff room is buzzing with bemused whispers- “No thinks any less of you,” Iris has assured her, “It had to happen sometime, she’s twelve, her mother is a teacher at her school, of course she was going to snap and rebel at some point-,”

The bitter truth is that Amy is left hoping that’s what it is. Just simple teenage meltdown. Things are different now. When Amy was young they didn’t place such an emphasis on adolescence, or at least it seemed that way. You were a child and you were expected to obey adults and not cause a fuss, and then gradually you became a young lady or young man, and you were expected to not cause a fuss because you were sensible and polite, and then you were a grown-up, and you had enough to worry about with everything going on in the world that there was no real cause for dissent or rebellion. 

Now, though- God, everything is about teenagers. No one knows whether to celebrate or be terrified of them. They’re delinquents and freaks and they rove about in gangs and they smoke and drink and curse and wink at the camera and they have sex at about the same rate, they just brag about it now, and they do absurd things with their hair and they wear their clothes oddly and they dance to music no one understands. Twelve is still a little girl, surely. Amy knows Mae is growing up, of course she is, but there is a wide gulf between a sullen twelve year old and an out of control sixteen year old, surely. Her body may be changing but she is still emotionally speaking, mentally speaking, very much a child. And there is a sense of loss there, of course there is. Amy is used to children. She grew up surrounded by children crying out for attention. But she’s only just begun to get used to dealing with teenagers as an adult herself, and what she can put up with in other people’s children, in her own-

She knows she needs to calm down. The year is off to a bit of a rough start but they’ll get through it. Dumbledore knows now and he’s got a plan and there is some relief in letting someone else take over. He can be… eccentric but he’s taken down Grindelwald, who had entire armies. Tom just has a government. Granted, a national government, but the Ministry is minuscule compared to any muggle counterpart. Dumbledore will catch him out in some lie or crime and this… this Order will step up and it will be handled and if anyone needs healing, well, that’s what Amy’s there for. Dumbledore swore a blood oath he’d keep Mae out of danger. If the magic doesn’t hold him to that, she will. 

But the nature of any secret society, it turns out, is that you can hardly have regular weekly meetings where everyone sits down and has a nice, measured discussion about the schedule for the upcoming months, so it’s been a bit… erratic. Or maybe that’s just her. Erratic. Scattered. Pretending everything is fine while she’s dumping water out of a rapidly sinking rowboat. They got through the summer because Tom and many of his people were out of the country, off winning hearts and minds across Europe. And while she wants to tell herself that he cannot reach her behind Hogwarts’ high walls, that’s never exactly been true. He managed to get up to plenty of things while a student here himself, hiding behind his prefect’s badge and his high marks. 

The only bright spots have been that teaching has been a bit easier, now that the students are used to her and her methods, and Iris and Sidney, of course. Especially Sidney, at times. It’s not- she’s been very clear with him, that it can never be anything more than an occasional night here or there, and even then, she is always very careful to make sure no one is watching her movements. She can’t countenance possibly putting him in danger. But she can- she can admit that there is something to be said for the relief. To being able to feel vulnerable in that… in that way again. It had been a while. And Sidney has been very accommodating, understands implicitly that any sort of relationship simply can’t happen, just seems genuinely pleased to spend time with her. Iris doesn’t seem to have caught on to anything untoward, to her relief- Amy wouldn’t want that, they’re her colleagues, not just her friends, the last thing she needs is Iris feeling as though she’d wedged herself in between her and Sid. 

She should be looking forward to the Hallowe'en feast tonight, as she always did as a student, but instead she’s in her last class of the day, a Friday afternoon, watching Mae glower down at her herbicide potion. The rank, chemical smell suffusing the air from over two dozen bubbling cauldrons is not improving anyone’s mood. Amy paces the length of the room, checking over students’ work, and compliments Valerie Faraday on the shade of her potion, a dark pine green, then lets Christine Applewhite know that her heat should be medium, not high while she adds in the Flobberworm mucus. Christine, grimacing as it drips spongily across her dragonhide gloves, nods. 

There’s a hissing noise behind her. Amy turns just in time to watch Mae dump far too much Horklump juice into her cauldron; that’s nearly twice the amount the recipe requires. And she knows this potion, too, she’s watched Amy brew it dozens of times. “Mae,” Amy snaps, then, conscious of the eyes on them, struggles to keep her tone even, “That much juice makes the concentrate unstable, you need to dilute it with more water, now-,”

“I’m all out,” Mae says, in a cold, sardonic voice, holding up her empty pitcher. The cauldron lets out a high-pitched squeal like a kettle. Marian Darvesh’s eyes go wide as saucers; she backs away from the table just as the potion bubbles over in a surge of sickly-grey green liquid, coursing down the side of the cauldron and across the table-top, dripping onto the floor. A chorus of nervous giggles and whispers breaks out; for once Mae seems utterly unfazed, not embarrassed or flustered in the least. She barely blinks, instead stepping out of the way of the mess she’s just made, and gathering up her things. The clock tower tolls, far, far above them but still audible down here in the dungeons. 

“You have an essay due on Monday!” Amy reminds the class sharply, trying not to lose her temper in front of a horde of impressionable children. “One foot of parchment on the practical uses of this potion and its development in the late 1910s! Do not be afraid to cite outside texts- Mae, stay back,” she barks, as her daughter attempts to join the throng of students skirting out the door. Gradually, the room empties out. Mae stands with her arms folded, her back against the slightly damp stone wall, expression stony. 

Amy holds her tongue until the door has shut firmly behind the last straggler, then says, “You are going to clean up this mess you’ve just made, and then we are going to have a serious chat about your attitude, miss.”

Mae says nothing, icily shrugging off her book-bag and stalking over to the corner to fetch a mop and bucket. Amy watches her just as frigidly, trying to restrain herself from saying more, but she can’t help it. “The only person you’re hurting here is yourself,” she says, as Mae returns with the mop and bucket. “Honestly. I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, but this behavior is unacceptable. Ever since term started you’ve been extremely unpleasant to be around, and this past week is just out of line, Mae.”

“I’m sorry I’m not thrilling you with my presence every waking moment,” Mae snaps, as she starts to mop. “I’m sorry I’m not your perfect child, sorry I don’t set an example-,”

“I am not asking you to be perfect,” Amy retorts. “I am asking you to be respectful. If you’re angry with me about- about what happened in the spring, we can talk about it, but you shouldn’t be taking it out on other people-,”

“You take plenty of things out on me,” Mae says under her breath.

Amy blanches. “That’s not true. Mae, I’m not angry with you-,”

“Of course you are!” The mop squelches angrily. “Stop lying, Mum!”

“I am not- I’m not holding some sort of grudge,” Amy snaps. “And I don’t know what’s made you think that, but if you won’t talk to me, how are we supposed to resolve it?”

“I don’t know!” To her shock, Mae sounds genuinely distraught, not just irritated and lashing out at her only target- Amy. 

Amy feels a prickling of unease. Has something happened? Something she’s reluctant to talk about? Did she miss something? This summer, or last month? She bites her lower lip for a moment, then waves her wand at the table, cleaning it with a simple charm. Mae throws down the mop in disgust. “Well, what was the point of that!” She sounds like Tom when she’s angry like this, she always has. The voices of a young girl and a young boy aren’t so far apart. She gets that set to her mouth like he always does, that crackling edge to her words, she holds herself rigid and tense like him, makes fists she rarely uses, taps out angry patterns on her legs. 

“Mae,” Amy says, in a softer tone. “If… if something else has happened, and you don’t- I promise, I will not be angry with you, no matter what’s happened. If you’re frightened about something, or someone’s said something to you-,”

“I am not afraid!” Mae takes a step back from her, face reddening in fury, skinny arms wrapped around herself protectively. “I’m not you! I don’t- I don’t just _run away_ from the things that scare me!”

Amy feels viscerally stung, as if slapped. “That is not fair,” she says, in a lower, hoarser voice. “Mae. That isn’t what-,”

“No!” Mae holds up a finger, as if she were the parent, rebuking the guilty child. “No,” she says, venomously. “You don’t get to- I am so sick of you coming down on me like I’m some- like I’m the one who’s made all this- it’s your fault!” she spits out. “It’s not mine, alright! I didn’t want any of this, and you just- you lied to me! For _years_! For- forever, really! About everything, I mean- was any of it true, or did you just…” To Amy’s horror, she sounds close to tears for a moment. “Is it all just- just made-up stories?”

Amy feels a sensation that is far stronger than a tingling of unease or apprehension. It is dread. Real, genuine dread. “Mae,” she says. “We cannot have this conversation here.” She’s pretty certain the corridor outside is empty, but she can’t be sure. She pulls the key to the storage room out of her trouser pocket. “If you- in there. Just. Please. Let’s go in there.”

Once that door is shut behind them, an extra layer of protection against eavesdroppers, Amy leans against it, exhaling almost shakily. Mae doesn’t look much calmer, if anything she is even more keyed up in the enclosed space, pacing angrily back and forth. Amy resists the urge to slip right back out of the room and slam the door shut behind her. She can’t run from this. But God, does she want to. She’s still trying to frantically reassure herself. Mae is dramatic. She’s young. She takes everything very seriously. This doesn’t mean that she-

“So when were you going to tell me?” Mae demands, with a snide, almost triumphant edge to her words. “I mean, when, really, Mum? When I came of age? When you were on your deathbed? When someone else told me? Is he even a real person?”

“Mae,” Amy says, through her teeth. “Just tell me who you’re talking about-,”

“MY FATHER!” Mae all but shrieks. “My dad! Because it’s not Shelby, is it, that’s just some- some lie you made up because you knew I was too little and _stupid_ to know otherwise! Like Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy!”

Amy knows if she denies it now, she will lose whatever respect is left. She swallows hard instead, heart pounding in her chest. “Did someone tell you-,”

“I’m not an idiot,” Mae hisses, “although you’d rather I was, wouldn’t you! No one told me, I figured it out myself! I’m _not_ stupid! And I’m not a little girl you can just- manipulate to do what you want by telling me some pretty- fantasy story about how you wish your life had gone! Alright! It’s all one big lie! I know it’s not Shelby, I know he’s not a muggle, I know this-,” She pries the dog-tags out from under her blouse, holding them up in Amy’s face, then fumbles furiously with the clasp and rips the chain from her neck, tossing it on the dusty floor, “is all _bullshit_!”

Amy says nothing, scooping up the tags in dismay. She can't just leave them there. He doesn't deserve that. She doesn’t- she can’t think of what to say, of how to word this, explain this in a way that won’t make Mae hate her even more. “I-,”

“It’s bullshit,” Mae says, in a slightly more restrained voice. “You know it, Aunt Ruby knows it, and now I know it. I heard you, that night, outside. And honestly- I probably knew, deep down, before that, that it wasn’t really true either. That man isn’t my father. He’s just some- some _stupid muggle_ you found dead in some bunker somewhere.”

“Mae,” Amy utters, horrified. “That’s not-,”

“I’m not finished!” Mae snaps. “And I know I didn’t just- randomly develop parseltongue, either. It’s not you like said. It’s not- it’s inherited. I got it from someone. From my real father.” Her voice cracks a little. “You told me I didn’t have one! You said he died! Why would you- you’re a liar! All this time, ever since we came here, you could have told me- you should have told me! And you didn’t! You lied, again and again, and again! And you thought I was just dumb enough to always believe you, is that it!”

“That is not it,” Amy says, desperately, reaching for her. Mae bats her hand away like an angry kitten. “Mae. Look at me. Mae! I know you’re not stupid. You are so smart, you are much smarter than I was at your age- Mae, you are incredible. This has nothing to do with you. I just- I wanted you to be happy. For us to be happy, and I thought that… that what I told you would make things easier-,”

“Well, it hasn’t!” Mae chokes out. “It really hasn’t, Mum! I don’t- are you ashamed of me?” She looks up, blue eyes shining with tears. “I mean- do you think I’m like _him_ , and you didn’t want to…”

“Oh, love, no,” Amy says, fighting back her own tears. “Mae- Mae, I could never be ashamed of you, you are- Mae, you’re my daughter, _I love you_ , I love you so much, and that’s why I had to-,”

“To lie?” Mae wipes at her eyes. “You could have told me! I wouldn’t have- I wouldn’t have told anyone else, I mean, why would I- I just don’t- you said you hated him! You said he was a horrible person, and now- I mean, he’s my father?” She sounds very young and frightened, at that last question, almost as if part of her is still hoping Amy will deny it.

“He- he’s your father in… in a biological sense,” Amy takes Mae’s clammy hands in her own, although her own are shaking, “but that doesn’t- you are _my_ daughter, Mae. Mine. Not- there is no part of you that is… It’s just us. It will _always_ be us, alright? He is never going to be-,”

“He didn’t want me?” Mae says, in a small voice. “I mean- does he know? Did he- did he make you go away because he didn’t want me?”

Amy’s heart breaks in two. It doesn’t take much effort. She pulls Mae close. “He doesn’t know. That’s why I- I didn’t know when I left, either, Mae. And then when I did, I knew I couldn’t- I knew he could never know. Because I had to keep you safe. I had to keep _both_ of us safe, and-,”

“But I’m his daughter,” Mae breaks away from her, face crumpled and red. “I- I’m his daughter, so- I mean, there’s- there’s bad people who… who like their kids, right? If he knew I… if he knew I was his daughter, he wouldn’t be so angry with you, maybe-,”

The terror replaces the grief, quick as a flash. “No,” Amy says. “Mae. No. That’s not- it’s like I told you back in April, alright? He doesn’t just- he doesn’t just hate me because I have a daughter, it’s… he is _not_ a good person. Mae, please. You need to listen to me. He is a very, very dangerous person, and he- if he knew you were… that he was your father, it would not stop him from hurting you.”

Mae sniffs, blinking back tears again. “But I didn’t do anything to him! He- he hates me just for- for existing?”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Amy says, feeling as though she’s navigating around a field full of landmines, “but he- he does hate _me_ , Mae, and him… knowing what you are, to him, that wouldn’t- it would not make things better for anyone. Alright? He would try to hurt you, just to hurt me. To use you. He doesn’t care- he wouldn’t care what you’ve done or haven’t done. He wouldn’t see you as his child. He would see you… as something to control, or throw away,” she swallows, feeling like a monster at the look on Mae’s face, so crushed and distraught, wet with tears. 

“But I’m his daughter,” Mae says again.

“Not everyone- not all fathers are good to their daughters, Mae.” Amy brushes some loose hair away from her face, cups her chin in her hand. “That’s why I- that’s why I lied.”

Mae scowls, and wrenches her face away. “You didn’t have to! I- do you have any idea how- you didn’t just lie, you- you made me think a whole… none of it was real! You said you _loved him_!”

“I-,” But she can’t say that. It’s like she thought. Mae is still too young for some things. How can she understand how loving someone could turn to hating them, fearing them? How you could still love a memory, and loathe the rest? Amy doesn’t want her to ever find out. “I love you,” Amy says instead, “and I- I did care about him, once, your father. When we were young, I… we were close. We were still close, in some ways-,”

“Close enough to sleep with him, I guess!” Mae snarls.

Amy flinches. 

Mae’s snarl fades, her mouth goes taut and worried. “How did that even… you said you wanted to get away from him,” she says, wrapping her arms back around her midsection. “You knew what he did. Why would you…” She looks like she might be sick. Amy feels sick. “I- how did that even- did he… did he make you-,”

“No,” Amy says, fiercely. “Mae. Look at me. No. That is not what- I… I was just… up until I left, I wanted him to think that… that I was going to stay with him, and so I…” She feels wretched, the lowest thing on the earth. “I acted a certain way. I lied to him. I’m not- I am not proud of it, Mae, but it was the _only way_ -,”

Her daughter is staring at her in horror, in revulsion. “You were together, I mean- were you… a couple?” she asks, hollowly.

Amy hesitates. “We… he wanted to… for a little while, yes. It wasn’t… we kept it secret. Or tried to, but I didn’t- if I had known then, what he would become-,”

Mae backs away, shaking her head. “You should have stayed,” she says, and Amy feels like she’d just been punched in the gut. 

“No.”

“You should have stayed!” Mae all but shouts. “Okay! Maybe you should have! I mean- you could have helped him, or- I don’t know, this doesn’t- you just left! You left and I never even- maybe he wouldn’t be so _horrible_ now if you hadn’t lied and took me away from him!”

“NO,” Amy all but roars back at her. Her throat aches. “ _No_ ,” she says. “You- you don’t understand. Me- me staying, it would not have solved anything.”

“Well, neither did you running away! At least that way I’d have a _real_ family!” Mae pauses after that, as if processing what she’s just said, eyes wide. Her mouth snaps shut. 

“What we have,” Amy says. “Is a real family, Mae. What you would have had with him- alright. Do you want to know? Really? It would have been _hell_.” Her anger is outpacing her heartbreak, her guilt, her shame- she has not spent the past decade telling herself, over and over again, that she did the right thing, only to have it all thrown back in her face, she is not going to sink into that spiral again, not going to blame herself for not being able to fix him-

“It would have been hell,” she snarls. “He would have- do you know what he wanted? What he really, really wanted, more than me- more than you- more than anything else? Power. He wanted power. And he didn’t much care how he got it, and my life would have been- it would have been nothing, Mae! _Nothing_! Instead of helping people, instead of doing anything meaningful in the least, I would have been in a very pretty, very secure, golden cage! And so would you! And I wouldn’t have been a healer, not really, I would have been his- his conscience, trying to explain to him why murdering and blackmailing people isn’t something to be proud of! I would have been a trophy!”

“An object! A fucking doll on a shelf, Mae! Do you think that would have been fun? A nice way to grow up? Do you think he’d- he’d really care what I wanted, what you wanted? No. It would have been hell. Hell for me, and hell for you, and you- as much as you hate me right now, you would have never forgiven me for letting you grow up like that. That’s not a real family, Mae. That is a prison sentence. He doesn’t- he doesn’t love me. Maybe once he thought he did. He didn’t. He loved having someone to make him feel good about himself. He does not love you. He will _never_ love you. There is nothing- nothing!- you could ever do, or say, or achieve that would make him a loving, good person. You mean nothing to him. And the only thing I mean to him is that I am something he thinks he owned, that ran away and disobeyed him. That is it.”

“You don’t know that,” Mae whispers.

“No,” Amy says bitterly. “I do. I know him far better than you ever will, thank god. Do you think he’d be pleased, to find out you’re his? He wouldn’t. He has his life all put together, and we- we are not part of it, and I am very, very grateful for that. He would- you’d be a black spot on his stainless record. An embarrassment for him. He’d want to get rid of you.” If she felt low before, she must be burning and writhing in hell now, but she has to say it. If she has to be cruel, if that is what it will take- she would rather Mae hate her forever, and be safe, than think she can… can change any of this, and pay for it with her life, or her freedom. “He does not want you,” she says, sharply. “Not in any good way, Mae.”

Mae stares at her for a moment. The color has all but left her face. In the dark of the storage room, she is a pale wraith of a girl, and her eyes are luminous with rage. “You’re pathetic,” she says, and every word is Tom’s, it seems to Amy. Him, speaking through her, somehow. His presence lingering, malignant, even without the ring. 

Mae scoffs, shakily. “He’s- he’s a monster, I guess, and you’re- I can’t believe I ever defended you. To anyone. You’re a _liar_ , and a _coward_ , and- if I am in danger, it’s as much your fault as his, from what I can tell. No one made you keep me. No one made you have his baby. You- you know what I think?” She swallows. “I think you wanted- you wanted to hurt him, just like he hurt you, and you thought you could use me to do it. Keep me away from him so you felt like you won, like you got one over on him. Like you were better than him. You’re not. You’re pathetic,” she repeats herself, “and I don’t want to be around you right now.”

“Mae,” Amy says, eyes burning. “Please. You know that’s not true-,”

“Right,” Mae spits. “Just like everything else, right? Get out of my way.” She shoulders past Amy- she’s only a few inches shorter, now- wrenches open the door, and crosses back into the classroom, snatching up her bag. She stands there in a corner for a few moments, shoulders trembling, obviously trying to get herself under control. “Don’t worry,” she says, coldly. “I’m not going to tell anyone-,”

“Does anyone else know?” Amy asks her, from the doorway. She’s crying but she refuses to acknowledge it. “Did you tell anyone that you- that you suspected, or that you’re a Parselmouth-,”

“No,” Mae snaps hatefully. “Your little secret’s safe with me. That’s all you wanted, right?” She runs a hand through her mussed, dark hair, fixes her bangs. “See you on Monday, Professor.” She storms out, slamming the classroom door shut behind her. 

Amy crumples immediately, hating herself for it. Mae is not- not wrong. She is pathetic, and a liar, and a coward, and she has put Mae in danger, and there is no going back now. No walking this back. No fixing it with a smile and a warm embrace. Mae knows the truth, or most of it, and she is disgusted. She’s ashamed. Amy made her feel that way. Amy put her in that position. Amy swallows back a sob. She’s not the child here. She shouldn’t be crying. She has no right to cry. But he doesn’t know. That is the only thing she has right now, the only semblance of comfort. Mae’s found out, but he hasn’t, and if she can just keep it that way- Lydia Rosier will be back here in a few weeks. Her stomach swirls until she can’t keep it down anymore. She vomits into one of the industrial sinks bordering the classroom, until there’s nothing left in her. Amy turns on the tap and watches it swirl down the stainless steel drain, looking at her mottled reflection in the metal, the vaguest outline of a woman, of a mother. 

Forces herself to stand up straight, breathes out and in. Again. He doesn’t know. Mae is still safe for now. She can still keep her safe, even if she never forgives her, even if she wishes she’d never been born, that she had a different mother, different father, different life. So long as she’s safe, surely Amy isn’t a complete failure. She will have succeeded in that, at least, even if she’s made a fine mess of everything else, to the point where her own child looks at her with complete revulsion and contempt. Even if Amy agrees with her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. So that got dark! The first section of this chapter takes place in the summer of 1946, a year after Amy left Tom. The Tom we see in that section is obviously still holding out hope that Amy is about to come back to him, only to hear through the grape vine that she is/was pregnant. Now one would think the reasonable reaction here would be for Tom to seriously consider that it might be his child, but given the vagueness of not knowing precisely 'when' Amy was said to be pregnant, and his own... rampant problems... Tom concludes that if it *was* his child, she would have immediately returned to him so they could raise the child together. Therefore, it must be someone else's.
> 
> 2\. What follows is probably the darkest sequence in this story so far. I don't mean to be graphic but I wanted to get across just how visceral Tom's anger and sense of betrayal was in that moment, and what follows is this sort of malicious fantasy of him 'destroying' what he imagines as Amy's happy family life with another person and their child. And then some less fantastical, serious debate over whether or not he could go after her right then and there and actually follow through on those horrible thoughts. I don't think this is *totally* removed from Snape's best-case-scenario in canon of Voldemort murdering James and Harry, but leaving Lily alive.
> 
> 3\. In the present, Tom's reaction is a bit more muted, but mostly because he's still in shock/disbelief and because he is trying to convince himself that this 'totally not a big deal, whatever, I definitely would have found out, it's fine-'. He's obviously feeling very embarrassed and enraged that Lydia, of all people, was the one to drop the hammer, that he didn't seriously consider this sooner, that Amy was able to use his assumptions against him and didn't break down in terror and confess everything, etc. I guess it'd be a little too much to expect Tom to dive right into some serious introspection as to how he's fucked up. He also tries to convince himself that he feels nothing for Mae or even the idea of Mae, and that his only investment in her is that she is his child and thus 'part of him', as much as his horcrux.
> 
> 4\. Tom then goes into some consideration as to how he's going to have an um... frank discussion with Amy. He rejects the idea of framing her for some crime, of going to Hogwarts himself, of having Carmody abduct Mae to lure Amy out, etc. But he does come to some sort of idea he thinks will work, prompted by Michael Applewhite showing up with some bad news. 
> 
> 5\. Honestly I think the stereotype of the villain who just instantly kills every crony who messes up a task (even an important one) is a little overdone at this point. Tom's not a rampaging dark lord, he holds a position in government, and if he murdered every single person who made him mad, messed up something he wanted them to do, or who he just didn't like... he'd have a dwindling base of supporters. Of course, that doesn't mean he's above some 'corrective measures' here and there, and it is really just a convenient excuse to vent all his rage on someone. 
> 
> 6\. Well, the cat's out of the bag with Amy and Mae, for real this time. As brutal as it was to write them like this, I wanted to show the full weight that Amy's lies, however kindly meant, have had on Mae, and what it really prompts is a full-on screaming and crying meltdown, because again, Mae is 12 and not emotionally equipped to handle this in a calm and mature manner. Mae's trust in Amy was already eroded and this is just really the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. And Mae, reeling from the discovery that her father is A. not who she thought and B. a very bad person, is desperately trying to make it make sense or to somehow 'fix' this- she blames Amy because Amy is there, not Tom, and she feels safe enough with her mother to go off on her like that. Amy does not help matters by trying to scare Mae straight, as she is terrified Mae will begin to think of Tom as a perhaps sympathetic figure who might love her purely because she is his child. This, of course, just sort of backfires. Amy and Tom are at times equally biased in their own ways, as they both have a 'set image' of one another that they refuse to deviate from.
> 
> 7\. The big take-away from this chapter is that since Mae does not tell Amy the full truth- that Ambrose told her about parselmouths, and Ambrose being Lydia's cousin, this puts Amy at a serious disadvantage, as she does not believe Tom has found out yet. Amy does not think Tom knowing the truth would make him less likely to harm her or Mae- in fact, she thinks the opposite is probably true. 
> 
> 8\. As always you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	29. Matthew III - Mae XII - Amy XI

NOVEMBER 1958, MADRID

“Were you this nervous when your wife had a baby?” Jaime asks, rather waspishly, Matthew thinks, as he grounds a furrow in the plush carpeting from his pacing. “Come on. In and out. It’ll be over before you even know it.”

Matthew wants to bite his head off, and feels entitled to it, after over five months cooped up in this villa, but he can also recognize by now that Isola is just trying to distract him by making conversation. And he isn’t entirely ungrateful for it. Slughorn went out to fetch his ‘dear friend Rosario’ nearly two hours past, and while Matthew can understand why it was more convenient to bring her here than be possibly seen out in public going to her, that doesn’t mean he likes waiting. He never has. 

“When Evelyn was having Beth I was beside myself,” he says, shortly, sitting down in one of the spacious parlor’s many overstuffed leather armchairs. It squeaks angrily in response. “And it wasn’t exactly ‘over before I knew it’,” he scoffs. “Do you have any siblings?”

Jaime shrugs, as is his habit. There are no straight answers with him. But seeing Matthew’s annoyed stare, concedes, “A couple.”

“Older or younger?”

“Both. Girls,” he adds, shortly. These past months Matthew has tried to pry a little into Jaime’s past, as is his wont, being an auror- if he even still counts as an auror, after this debacle. He tries not to think about it. His multiple attempts to contact Evie have all been rebuffed, by both Isola and Slughorn. Granted, Slughorn is the far more pleasant of the two about it, urging Matthew to think of the danger he might put them in if his letter were intercepted or if the Floo Network was being monitored- which it is, Matthew can admit that much, it is regularly used to flag and stop break-ins, home invasions, that sort of thing. 

Jaime had, the last time, inquired if Matthew wanted to come home to a dead wife and a dead kid, or if he was just stupid. The ferocity of it led Matthew to suspect that there’s something personal there. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to discuss his family or his childhood in Spain. He blames himself for something, or feels he got his family hurt. 

“And no,” Jaime says now, “I wasn’t there for the births, Inspector Abbott. I count it as a mark in my favor, you know, not having been present for anyone’s birth but my own.” He’s adjusting the cuffs of his faded dress shirt, borrowed from Slughorn and far too baggy around the waist, even tucked into his slacks. His scarlet tinted sunglasses are pushed up atop his newly shaved head; instead of going out for a proper haircut, he bought a razor and cut it down to black stubble. It’s growing back quickly, but he looks ridiculous, even with a brand new bomber jacket. 

“No children scurrying about, then?” Matthew goads. 

Jaime shakes his head. 

“Never found the right woman to settle down with, I suppose.”

Jaime scoffs, brow wrinkled. “I look like someone who’s ever wanted to settle down, to you? That window is closed, locked, barred,” he ticks off on his fingers, “padlocked, facing a wall-,”

“You can’t be any older than forty, if that,” Matthew snorts. “Plenty of men your age are only just starting families.”

“Thrilled as I am that you’re rooting for little Jaimes running around someday,” Isola says brusquely, “I’ve got this nasty premonition the married life is not for me. Call it a hunch!” Then, “Damn, you have warmed up to me, Bishop! Six months ago you wanted me dead in the ground, and now you want the whole family tree.”

“You’re the one who brought it up,” Matthew sighs, letting his worried gaze drift up to the white-washed ceiling. “Always going on about my Beth or Amy and her daughter… You’re fond of them,” he accuses, wondering why he is not more appalled by the interested a murderous criminal has taken in an old friend. He knows he’s slipping. Time and proximity have made him let his guard down around Jaime, almost consider him a comrade, of sorts. That’s a mistake. Isola might not want him hurt, might have had the right idea, bringing him to Slughorn, getting them back in the loop of what’s going on back home, but that doesn’t mean he’s some saint among men. No doubt he’s being well-compensated for whatever this is, even if he saved Matthew of his own accord. 

“Me?” Jaime whistles. “What? Fond? No. She owes me one, is all. I have to keep track of my debtors, you know? You do a little forgery work, suddenly you’re on Britain’s Most Wanted and you’ve got some legion of government goons breathing down your neck. Never again. I should have charged her double. Triple, even! Can’t have her thinking she can just waltz into my place of business-,”

“What is your place of business, exactly?” Matthew has given up on trying to find out what exactly Jaime forged for Amy. Whatever it was, it must have been big. 

“None of your goddamn business, LTD,” Jaime retorts, and continues without missing a beat, “-blink those big blue eyes at me, and suddenly get me caught up in her web of deception!” He huffs. “I was supposed to be making good money this year! I had plenty of things lined up! Now- you know who wants to work with someone who’s got hit wizards on their tail? No one. That’s who.”

“So you’re saying this infringes on your life of merry crime,” Matthew drawls, folding his hands across his chest.

“Exactly,” Jaime points at him. “I could be in Morocco right now, breaking into a safe, hitting the beaches. Instead I am here. Breaking into your head. In Madrid. Lovely city, you know, aside from the muggle dictator, but not ideal, Matteo! Not! Ideal!”

Matthew grimaces, and stands up, running his hand along an ornate carved side-table laden down with a collection of glass vases. “Can we not call it that? Breaking into my head?” 

Slughorn likes to collect, to curate. He’d make an excellent museum director. Every room of this ornate villa is full of some sort of selection of ornaments or trinkets or pieces of art. For a man who supposedly fled the country out of fear of Gaunt, he did manage to bring quite a bit with him, unless these are all recent purchases. The inside of the villa looks like an antiques shop, a short of aesthetically pleasing clutter that makes Matthew feel like a bull in a china shop, always on the verge of breaking something. Jaime somehow maneuvers around it all with ease, but maybe that’s just from years of practice of sneaking around other people’s homes. 

“Ah, so dramatic,” Jaime rolls his eyes. “You act like she’s gonna strap you down and hypnotize you. It’s a little dust-up, that’s all! The best cover is not really a cover. Slughorn brings you back over, tells his tale of finding you injured months ago and not remembering shit, begs Tommy’s forgiveness for skipping out on him, their healers have a look at you, a crony obliviator takes a peek inside your head- all is in order! Memories in tip-top shape. All you know is you barely escaped the fire, took a nasty knock or two to the head, were found wandering the street dazed and confused. You don’t remember Applewhite trying anything nasty, you don’t remember the real hero of the hour, me, saving your very ungrateful self… Come on, it’s a temporary measure. She’s not erasing the past six months, just… amending it. Slughorn keeps the real memories, once you’re in the clear and they’ve checked you out over there, he smuggles them back to you, we’re all good.”

Matthew exhales. “Right, but I still won’t be…,” he gestures vaguely. “I won’t remember what you did for me.”

Jaime grimaces. “So? Come on. Don’t get all sentimental on me now, Abbott. If you had a pair of cuffs on you now-,”

“Jaime, you saved my life,” Matthew says, honestly. He’s always been honest. He still has that, he supposes, his honesty. He won’t be lying about anything if he can’t remember, at least not right away. “You saved my life knowing I’d still hold you in contempt. You didn’t have to do that, but you did.” He pauses, then admits, “I owe you everything.”

Jaime holds up his hands. “Let’s not go making any grand gestures, alright? Don’t get me wrong, it’s be fun playing cops and robbers with you, Matteo, but we…” he gestures between them, “well, probably best we go our separate ways after this anyways, yeah? You know. Assuming you get the old job back.” He laughs, but Matthew thinks it’s more like another mask sliding into place than anything else. He’s distinctly uncomfortable with any real admission of gratitude or sentiment, Jaime. 

“Well,” he says, “when I get those memories back… I’ll still be thankful.”

“Englishmen,” Jaime mutters under his breath, just as there’s the sound of a door opening and closing from the foyer. “And that’s my cue.” He strolls over to the door, pausing before it to glance back at Matthew with an almost rueful grin. “Whatever Rosario says about me- well, I’d tell you not to believe it, but you won’t be remembering it, will you?” 

Matthew sits back down as Jaime exits. There’s a few moments of muffled, angry-sounding conversation in the hall before Slughorn opens the door, escorting in a dark-haired witch in her forties, her eyebrows permanently arched as if in irritated question, her hair in a heavily sculpted bouffant that must have taken gallons of hair spray and gel to achieve, not a strand out of place. The raspberry magenta hue of her robes perfectly compliments her dangling earrings and the rings on her fingers. She snaps something after Jaime’s departing figure in Spanish, then turns to Matthew with an evaluating look.

“Matthew,” Slughorn smiles, genial as ever, as he closes the heavy door behind them, leaving them in the quiet sitting room with the only the gentle lazy whirring of the ceiling fan, “this is Señora Rosario Antonia Elpidia Isidora-,”

“I’ll stop you before you get to the family names,” Rosario says, cutting him off with a wave of her ringed hand. She has a pleasantly mellow, almost rhythmical sounding voice, as though she were an actress or singer. “No introductions necessary, Horacio. He won’t be seeing me a second time, I hope.” She smiles at Matthew, a flash of white teeth behind her pink lips.

He smiles slightly back, trying not to look like a nervous schoolboy.

In a whisper of satin, she pulls up a chair and sits down beside him, smoothing out her robes. “I find the more I talk the more nervous you get, so we’ll do this quickly, hm? It will take me an hour or so to remove the memories I need to remove and then stitch the fragments together. You will have a headache when you wake. Horacio will have you drink some water and take a nap. The first twelve hours after this will feel very strange, but your mind will work to convince itself that everything is alright. I am going to charm you into a trance while I work to avoid any unpleasantness. Horacio will remove it when I have left.”

“The memories I take from here,” she taps him on the forehead with a lacquered red nail, “will go into a series of small vials, which Horacio will keep until it is safe to return them to you. If you are examined by any healers or obliviators after this, they will only see what we want them to see. You wouldn’t remember the pain if it did, but this will not hurt. You have any muggles in the family? Think of it like dentistry. Once you’re sedated it’s just a little…” she makes a buzzing noise, as if imitating a bee. 

“You’re not going to see my whole life, are you?” Matthew asks, feeling a bit dim but also that it had to be asked.

She snorts. “For both our sakes, no. I haven’t got that kind of time on my hands, and you don’t have that kind of money. Are you comfortable in this chair?”

He nods, feeling a sudden queasy uneasiness. 

“Good,” she says, and raises her wand. Matthew tenses out of reflex, but she only smiles and lays it on his wrist, where his pulse is frantically thudding. As she chants the spell in Spanish, he feels it gradually slow, until he is almost sleepy, a pleasant sort of haze enveloping him like a warm blanket. His eyes are still open, but the room blurs around him like a patchwork of shapes and colors, not in an alarming way but in a sort of dream-like aura. He feels himself sinking deeper into the armchair, as though it were a bed. The chanting fades away, he feels his skin prickling, not unpleasantly, and then a cool sensation around his skull, as if someone had upended water on his hair during a hot summer day. 

The room isn’t in the villa anymore, but the grungy basement of that apartment block he knows so well. He is standing next to Applewhite, wand in hand, heart pounding once more. The smell of gasoline and smoke is suddenly overwhelming. He coughs and hacks, throwing useless spells at the growing fire. His wand looks strange, unfamiliar in his hands as he casts a shield charm and turns desperately to Applewhite, whose handsome face is slick with sweat and a sort of savage glee as he duels the culprit in the dark corners of the basement. 

“We need to get upstairs, if one of the boilers explodes-,”

There’s a creaking noise as the spell-damaged shelf beside him topples, and something solid connects with his head, sending him sprawling to the floor just as there is an overwhelming roar of fire.

NOVEMBER 1958, HOGWARTS

What Mae likes best about being around Malcolm, as opposed to the girls, is that Malcolm is content to just be quiet. Maybe that’s not strictly fair- Marian isn’t really chatty as a rule, but she will tend to make small talk because she thinks it’s rude to go too long without saying anything. But Malcolm grew up on a dairy farm as the middle child and is perfectly content to go not just minutes but hours in silence. Granted, when he does say something, it’s usually sarcastic or obnoxious, but Mae knows that’s just to be expected from a McGonagall, they all think they’re God’s gift to the wizarding world. 

She likes walking with Malcolm around the lake in autumn because they can throw handfuls of leaves and pebbles at each other without saying a word beyond shouted battle cries and threats, and she likes kicking mud at him, and she likes racing him along the dirt path she made with her bicycle this summer. But mostly, when it’s this cold it, the sort of cold where it feels like it could snow but stubbornly won’t, she likes to skip stones with him. He’s better at it, to her dismay, but sometimes she can distract him long enough to mess him up. Today though she’s not in a very good mood, so she is just as silent as him, albeit considerably more… scowly. 

“Whatever you’re so mad about,” Malcolm comments, after fifteen minutes of this, “it makes you way better at skipping stuff.”

Mae grunts a response, burrowing into her coat. 

Malcolm takes this as an opportunity to voice a hypothesis. He likes doing this. He thinks he’s really clever. He is, but he has ‘no tact whatsoever’ as Marian would say, and Mae thinks that’s true. Malcolm makes her look practically demure and polite. Growing up with Minerva hasn’t made him any better at reading a room. His sister is back in every Gryffindor’s bad graces- their vices?- after enforcing the rule against carrying pocket-warmer charmers in their clothes. Mae doesn’t think she really cares. She knows they’ll all forgive her when she helps them win the next match. 

“You’re mad about your mother, aren’t you? What did she do now, tell you off for getting caught in the armory last week?”

“I’m not mad,” Mae says, “I’m angry. There’s a difference.”

He grunts a response, skipping his next stone an impressive distance. “But you’re angry at your mum, right? ‘Cause it’s not Christine. That’s how I know, because usually you just argue with her-,”

“Alright, I get it, Mal,” Mae snaps. “Yes. I’m… angry at my mum.” The last part comes out sounding more like a mutter.

“What’d you do?” he asks, selecting another stone.

Mae huffs. “Right, because it’s all my fault she’s a liar?”

Malcolm glances up at her from his position squatting on the ground, his thick eyebrows furrowed. 

Mae reddens. “I- I just found out that something she told me wasn’t… the way it really is. I guess.”

He blinks, then stands up, stone in hand. “My mum’s a liar too,” Malcolm says conversationally, before flicking his wrist with one deft motion, sending the stone skipping across the shallows.

Mae frowns. “Because she didn’t tell your dad she was a witch?”

He snorts. “That’s really simplifying it.”

“Ooh, big word,” Mae mocks.

He pulls a face at her. “She didn’t just… not tell him she was a witch. She hid it from him, for years. Locked up her wand and never used magic, burned all her school things… It’s not just like she forgot to tell him or waited until after they were married, like the law says.”

“I bet no one even follows that law,” Mae rolls her eyes.

“They’re changing it now,” he points out. “I read about it in the Prophet. They’re going to make you get permission from the Ministry to marry muggles now. Interviews and forms and everything.”

“That’s never going to happen,” Mae says. “We have to marry muggles or there wouldn’t even be enough of us.” That’s what she used to think of herself, right? That Mum got together with a muggle, and just happened to make another witch. But her father isn’t a muggle. He’s not at all a muggle. He’s a Gaunt, or a Riddle, but- the point is he is the furthest thing from a muggle, he’s the bloody Minister! And he hates her. Or- Mum thinks he would hate her, if he knew. But he doesn’t know. He’ll never know. It makes her feel all sick and churny inside. 

Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’s changed. Just because he did bad things when he was young doesn’t mean he kept doing them. People can change. It happens all the time in her books. Loads of heroes start off as bad people and do terrible things, and then they change! Like in Detective Houndstooth, Lord Graymalkin starts off as a villain, but then he’s redeemed when he falls in love with the Countess Mathilde, and in the latest comic they’re having a baby and Lord Graymalkin only kills people sometimes, if they’re really bad. 

“Anyways,” Malcolm is very annoyed at being interrupted as usual, even though he interrupts people all the time, like a lot of boys, “the point is she hid something massive. For years. And she never even told him until she couldn’t hide it anymore, when Minnie started showing magic.”

Mae wrinkles her nose. “Was he angry with her, your dad?”

Malcolm looks at her as though she really is mad. “Of course he was. He didn’t speak to her for two weeks, Mum says. And even then- they were never the way they used to be again.”

Mae suddenly feels a horrible swooping sensation. “They don’t love each other anymore?” Her voice cracks, to her dismay. Her parents never even loved each other. Mum just pretended to love him so he wouldn’t suspect she was going to run away from him. He maybe never even loved her, he just wanted to control her. But maybe Mum’s wrong. Maybe she just doesn’t- she doesn’t think he loved her, but he did. It’s like Mae told her, even bad people can love, right? He’s not a robot, or an alien, like in the films. 

He’s an actual person, a human being. Mae has even seen him. She watched him get married. She feels a flare of strange anger? How could he do that? Mum is right here! They’re so close! He could have- couldn’t he have come to find them, properly apologized, made it alright again? He could have come at anytime. He didn’t. So maybe Mum is right, and he never really loved her, and he certainly wouldn’t love Mae. He’s married now, to some stupid society lady, and Mum and her are just- adrift on their little raft, watching the ship go by. 

She watched her own father get married to someone who isn’t her mother. She even heard him talking to a snake. What if he’d caught her? What would he have done? Would he have known the instant he looked into her eyes, the way it happens in the stories? Or would he have just… have hurt her, or threatened her, or something? She tries to align all the parts of him, like a puzzle. The teenaged boy in the yearbook photos, polished and perfect. The Minister in the papers, smiling and waving to the crowds of people. The bridegroom at the wedding, a snake in hand, curled round his forearm, speaking to him.

“Of course they love each other,” Malcolm says, impatient. “It’s just… probably not the same way, right? They’re married, they’ve got kids, they have to love each other at least a little.”

Mae furrows her brow. “No one has to love anyone.”

“Yeah, you do,” says Malcolm. “If otherwise you’re just gonna be miserable until you die. What, you think they’d get a divorce?” He sounds incredulous, almost amused. “McGonagalls don’t get divorced.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re Catholics.”

“That’s only part of it,” he reasons. “My dad’s too stubborn. Even if he hated my mum he wouldn’t divorce her. She’s his wife.”

“So what?”

“So, they made a promise,” Malcolm says. “To always be together, and they’re not going to blow it up just because she lied.”

Mae digs the toe of her shoe into the mud. “But they still love each other.”

“Yes,” he sounds exasperated. “Now you’ve got the gist of it.” He pauses. “It’s… she lied about being a witch, right? She lied about her past. But she didn’t lie about wanting to be with my dad. So he knows that was always true. He knows she gave up all that- her whole world- just because she wanted to be with him.” He exhales. “My dad’s not even that great. I wouldn’t give up my wand just because I liked a muggle girl.”

“What muggle girl would like you,” Mae snorts, but smiles so Malcolm knows she is joking, “honestly. Even the magic ones aren’t too interested-,”

He throws a handful of leaves and twigs at her, and they spend the next while chasing each other around the lake. When Mae’s running really fast and out of breath, it’s easy to forget about all the rest. Mum didn’t lie about her past, like Malcolm’s mother. She didn’t lie because she loved someone. She lied to pretend she was in love with someone. And she lied to Mae to keep her safe. But Mae wouldn’t be in danger in the first place if not for her! It’s not like she asked to be born! 

Of course, Mum didn’t ask to be born, either, but it’s not- no one made her have a baby! 

It’s not that Mae wishes she hadn’t been born, it’s just- she’d rather it not have been this way. She wishes he was dead. At least there’d be some closure in that. If he was dead. What would there be to argue about or wonder about? He’d be in the ground. Buried. She misses the familiar cool weight of the dog tags around her neck. She misses FW Shelby, even if he wasn’t real, even if Mum just made him up for a good story. She misses someone she never had. 

She misses Mum too, or the mother she thought she had. Seeing her like that, tearful and desperate, terrified Mae more than any shocking revelation about her father. Mum’s never cried in front of her like that, not ever. Her mother is not a crier, not weepy in the least. She’s not even someone Mae would call very emotional. Usually nothing seems to ruffle her, at least not until they came here. Now it seems like everything gets under her skin. 

Under Mae’s skin, too. She examines herself in every reflective surface now- mirrors, the back of spoons- searching for Tom Gaunt, waiting for him to pop his head up and give her a wave. She’s nothing like him. She’s not a Slytherin, she’s certainly not a blood purist, and the idea of working for the Ministry seems so dreadfully dull it’s almost laughable. Imagine being an actual witch and getting an office job. It’s a joke. 

She wishes it were all a joke, at least.

She decides to make a list of the ‘evidence’ Mum has revealed to, to sort things out. Mae always feels better having them down on paper. Under the covers in her bed, trying to ignore Valerie’s snores and Christine mumbling to herself in her sleep, she scrawls it on the back of some old Charms homework, using the light of her wand to see. The wind is starting to howl at night, rattling the tower’s eaves. She likes that; it feels like the weather is just as furious as her.

I thought lying to you about your father would make our lives easier and happier.  
I don’t think you are like him (evil? mad?) and I am not ashamed of you.  
I did not tell your father about you because I wanted to keep you (both of us) safe.  
Your father is not a good person (murderer?) and would hurt you even if he knew you were his daughter.  
He doesn’t hate you because he does not know about you, but he does hate me.  
He would use you to hurt me because he thinks of people as tools.  
I used to care about him when we were young but I do not anymore.  
I tricked him into thinking I loved him (still?) because I was planning to run away from him and did not know what else to do.  
When we were ‘together’ (what does that even mean, Mum?) we tried to keep it a secret (why?)  
He cares more about power than anything else.  
He would have made me be his conscience (what?)  
He does not love me and he does not love you (proof?)  
He would view you as a smear on his reputation because he is married and a Person in Government (PIG) now.

Thirteen pieces of evidence from Mum as to why she… did all this. If this were a proper detective story Mae would go to the other side and hear what they had to say about this, then figure out who was the real liar. But that’s not really possible. Mum might think she’s an idiot, but she is not, in fact, stupid enough to go writing Dear Minister… I believe you may be my father, can we meet to discuss this? Best wishes, Mae. Right. So that’s out. 

And she can’t go back in time and see any of this for herself. There’s a very limited number of people she could ask about any of this, like Mum’s friends, but they would either lie for Mum’s sake or might not even know in the first place. If Mum could lie to her for her entire life, why wouldn’t she lie or leave things out with Ruby and Vera? The only thing she can really do, right now, is go to Mum, try to keep herself from blowing up at Mum again, and ask for clarification. As if it were some assignment she was confused about. 

No. She’s not doing that. Absolutely not. If Mum wants to talk again, Mum can come find her, Mum can apologize properly, Mae still has her pride and is not going to go crawling back to Mummy just because she feels very alone and scared and doesn’t know what to do or who she is anymore-

Exactly thirteen days after their fight, she is hesitating outside Mum’s office door when it swings open. Mum almost walks right into her, a mug of tea in hand, a stack of folders in the other. She gapes at Mae for a moment, who goes bright red and skirts out of the way, avoiding eye contact. There is a long silence only broken by the clatter of a crowd of fifth years rounding the corner on their way to Chess Club. 

“Can I come in?” Mae mutters.

Mum steps back into the office, letting her pass, then firmly shuts the door behind them, casting a muffling charm under her breath.

Mae takes up her customary seat in front of the desk, although it feels horribly awkward. Mum puts her folders down, and instead of going behind it, sits on it instead, very unprofessionally, her short legs dangling several inches off the floor. “Would you like a biscuit?” she asks, after a minute or so goes by. Mae nods without looking up. Mum slides her a small tin.

While she is chewing it, Mum says, “We don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to. But we can if you do. I know I… the way I handled it- was not very good. I’m sorry. I am going to do my best never to let you down like that again, Mae. Alright? I love you, and to know that I… that I hurt you like that, made you feel this way, it’s something I don’t want to ever repeat.”

Mae swallows, reaches for a cup of water that is not there. Mum hands her her own mug instead, like she used to let them share hot drinks when Mae was little. Mae takes a few lukewarm sips, then grimaces and hands it back. “I’m sorry I called you names,” she says, and she supposes she really is, isn’t just saying it to make Mum feel better. Mum may be a liar… but she probably isn’t a coward if she came back here with Mae anyways. And she’s not pathetic, either. 

Mum swallows, but she seems much calmer than before, although the worry in her eyes is obvious when she looks at Mae. “I know I didn’t… it might be better to just- to explain to you what it… how it went between us. I know you’re probably confused, and upset, and… and you don’t understand, and that is my fault, not yours. I didn’t tell you the truth and I’ve just muddled everything up even more for you.”

Mae wants to say something, but decides to hold her tongue, like a professional detective would. 

“When I was born,” Mum says, slowly, not really looking at Mae, but past her, to the cluttered bookshelves and the calendar on the back of the door, “my mum was even younger than I was when I had you.” She pauses. “She was a prostitute.” Mae has never actually heard her say that aloud before. “I don’t… I don’t know about her family, if she had any, or… I don’t think she wanted to go back to them, if she did. She worked in a brothel.”

“I know what that is,” Mae says, and then, at the look Mum is giving her, adds defensively, “from books!”

“Well,” Mum says, “it was… it was not a place to bring up a baby. And I think she knew that. But she tried. She didn’t know what she was doing. But she kept me until I was about five or so. And then she realized that it- it was no life for a little girl, and she decided to give me up.”

“Did she tell you she was going to?” Mae frowns.

“No,” says Mum, “we got a cab to the orphanage, she had me sit in a chair, she went in and signed some papers, and then she came out, said goodbye, and left.” Her tone is completely neutral, almost emotionless.

Mae stares at her. “She left you?”

“Yes,” says Mum.

“But that’s horrible! How could she do that?”

“She thought it was the best thing for me,” Mum says, “that’s what I like to think, anyways. I- it’s not that I’ve never been angry with her, Mae. I have. But there’s… there is no point in hating her, in holding onto it. She made her decision, and I’m glad she did, rather than keep a child who she didn’t want. And maybe she did want me, but decided it was more important for me to be taken care of. I’d like to think that, maybe.”

Mae thinks she’d probably hate someone forever if they did that to her, if Mum had just left her in some strange building one day and never came back.

“So then I lived at Wool’s,” Mum says. “It was alright. I wasn’t happy, but they didn’t mistreat us. I didn’t have any toys, though, or any friends, until I met him.”

“Tom,” Mae says. His name feels very strange and heavy on her lips. “My dad.”

“Yes,” Mum’s voice is much softer now, and her face has almost softened slightly too, in regret or nostalgia or just sadness, Mae isn’t sure. “He was my age, and… and our rooms were right across from one another, and pretty quickly we found out that we were alike in… in our magic, too. We could do things no one else could. We didn’t know anything about the world, this world. We didn’t know there was a Hogwarts or a Ministry. We just knew we were special. And we had each other. That was all we had. It felt like… it felt like it was meant to be, almost.”

“And his mum died,” Mae says, “that’s what you said, last year. That she died when he was born.”

“She did,” Mum says, “but she wasn’t a muggle. She was a witch.”

“Witches can die having babies?” Mae hadn’t thought it was possible, not with magical healing.

“Anyone can die having a baby,” Mum says, “if they aren’t properly looked after or if they have certain conditions. But I don’t… I think he always felt that she… that she could have lived, and she… she just didn’t want to anymore.”

“Why didn’t she want to?”

Mum exhales. “Some women don’t want to have a baby at all, but they… they have to anyways, and then they don’t… well, they feel hopeless. And some women get very depressed after they have a baby, even if they wanted it. And her- I… his father was a muggle. They ran away together. And then he left them, I think. And I don’t think she wanted to live anymore after that.”

Mae shifts in her seat. “Was he angry with her? For leaving him?”

“Yes,” says Mum. “I think he was very angry. And he didn’t have anyone else to be his mother. Neither did I. We didn’t have any siblings. We didn’t have anyone. Everyone else avoided us. They were a little scared of us. That is the sort of thing- you can either… you can try, and try to make people like you, to fit in, like I did, even if it doesn’t work. Or you can decide they’re not worth it, that you’re better than them anyways. That’s what he did.”

“So he was a bad person, even then?” Mae presses.

“No,” Mum says quickly, almost defensively. “He was- he was a little kid. Just like me. He was scared and angry and- he was just a kid. No one is born all bad or all good. You grow up, and you have choices, and you decide who you’re going to be. He hadn’t decided, back then. Neither had I.”

She seems to gather herself a little. “And then we found out we weren’t alone. We were going to Hogwarts. We were getting out of the orphanage, and we were so excited, both of us. We got to escape. To be special, like we’d always thought we might be. It was- it was incredible. Like something out of a fairy tale. And then we got here, and we were sorted into different houses, but it didn’t matter, not at first. We were still best friends. We were still together. We were just so happy to belong somewhere, finally.”

“When did it start to matter?” Mae asks quietly.

“When we started to make our friends. You know this by now, Mae. Slytherin is… they value very different things from Hufflepuff. My friends were… all sorts of people. People who came from magical families and people who didn’t. His friends were purebloods. From old, old families. He felt like he needed to… be a certain way to fit in. To belong with them. We were still friends, but we- the people we hung around were very different. He was surrounded by people who believed being magic was… inherently superior, that muggles were ignorant, and stupid, and only fit to… to serve wizards. And he- I was never sure whether he believed it all, or just pretended he did so he would belong, or if he- if he was just so angry at what life had been like before Hogwarts that he hated every part of it.”

“But you liked each other,” Mae says. “I mean, you… you got together.”

“We did,” Mum acknowledges. “I was… I didn’t want to let him go. He was my first friend, my best friend. And he didn’t want to let me go either. I thought I- I did care about him, and he… cared about me, in his way, but I… I was a little girl. I thought it was love. I thought it was- was normal, that we would still be so… wrapped up in each other. And we were. For a very long time. Even when he upset me or I disapproved or we fought, we still… stuck to each other. But it got to where I… I couldn’t ignore it anymore. He thought he was a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

That’s what Ambrose said, Mae almost says, but catches herself. She can’t let Mum know she messed up and let Ambrose hear her speak Parseltongue. Besides, it’s not that big a deal. Ambrose doesn’t know anything, really. He’s probably forgotten all about it by now.

“And maybe- he might be,” Mum says, “he looked up his family, and… his father was a Riddle, a muggle, but his mother was a Gaunt. She never went to Hogwarts, but she was still a witch, from a very old line. He felt like it… it was fitting, that it meant something. Made him even more special. I didn’t… I didn’t care about any of that. He did. He felt like… he wanted to change things, even then. He wanted wizards to have as much power as possible. He wanted muggleborns to… to either not be allowed into our world, or to give up everything about their pasts, to totally conform. He thought muggles were beneath him. Beneath all of us.”

“But you’re a muggleborn,” Mae points out.

Mum gives an odd sort of smile. “He didn’t like to think about that. And I… I didn’t like to think of who he was becoming, but I… the people he hung around, they’re weren’t just… snotty blood purists. Some of them wanted to follow Grindelwald. Some of them just wanted to hurt muggles. I couldn’t just… ignore that forever. So we had a fight, and I broke it off with him. I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore.”

“He didn’t listen.”

“No,” says Mum, “and… we couldn’t have avoided each other even if we wanted to, we were being evacuated from the orphanage because of the war, and then we were both prefects- he thought I would come around. That I would forgive him. Maybe I even started to. I was… he made me feel… special, too. Like I mattered. But other things mattered more to him. We… we kept fighting, and I- I went out with someone else for a little while, and Tom… hurt him. To hurt me.”

Matthew Abbott, Mae thinks, but is not about to say that, either.

“And then I realized it wasn’t just… going to be that easy,” Mum exhales again. “To… he wasn’t going to listen, when I told him I didn’t want to be with him. He’d- he would hurt people to get me to do what he wanted, if he felt like it would work on me. And it would have. So I… I decided if I was going to… to stop this, it had to be permanent, after we graduated. So I acted like I forgave him. Like I was ready to… to be together again, in the future. And then I figured out a plan to get away. I found out that he… he had tracked down the Riddles, his muggle family. I don’t know why. Maybe to… to prove he was better than them, even if he was a poor orphan. More powerful, maybe. I don’t know. He… whatever happened, he killed them. It was in the papers, but they would never have been able to connect him to it. He got it blamed on his uncle, instead. Morfinn Gaunt. He went to prison for it.”

“Is he still there?” Mae asks, eyes wide.

Mum nods. “I… blackmailed him with that, and… drugged him with a potion, and then I left. And I never looked back.”

She says it like it was just a train she had to catch. Mae wonders why the hell the Hat ever put her in Hufflepuff in the first place.

“And you know the rest,” Mum says, voice tight and almost hard. “I’m sorry, Mae. I really am, that it ended up this way.”

Mae has a thousand other questions, her mind spinning like a carousel, but they’re interrupted by an insistent rapping at the window. Mum tense and looks around, but it’s just an owl. Teddy’s, Mae recognises it immediately, brightens impulsively despite her lingering anger and confusion. “Look, it’s Roger!”

Mum doesn’t answer, too busy taking the letter from him and reading it, brow furrowed. It mustn’t be very long, but she looks shocked when she finally sets it down on the desk. “Matthew Abbott is at St Mungo’s,” she says hoarsely to Mae.

Mae feels her eyebrows shoot up. “I thought he was dead!”

“So did I, and the papers haven’t announced anything yet, but Teddy heard about it and tipped me off.” Mum bites her lower lip for a moment, then glances at the clock. “Their visiting hours go to seven on a Friday. I have to stop by, it’s not right to- I’ll write his wife, in case she hasn’t heard yet either, and then I’ll go over.”

“Can I come?” Mae asks immediately.

Mum shakes her head even as she pulls out some loose paper and a quill. “I’m sorry, love, but- not tonight, alright? Besides, you’ve got your… your tutoring, right?”

Mae grimaces. “I suppose.”

ST MUNGO’S, NOVEMBER 1958

Amy knows she doesn’t stand a chance in hell of getting through the actual front lobby with a normal visitor’s pass, so she uses the mediwizard’s entrance instead, which she remembers well from her work here as a sixteen year old. It leads into a narrow, wood-paneled corridor lit by green and blue lamplight. She moves quickly across the creaky old floors, trying to map out the hospital in her head, hoping they haven’t changed the floor plan much in the past decade. 

There should be a back stairwell around the corner. She pushes through the glass-paneled doors and starts to ascend, gripping the slick bannister, thoughts racing. Matthew is alive. Somehow. She didn’t get him killed for nothing. He’s alive. She’s not sure whether to be thrilled or feel even more guilt-ridden. She hopes he’s alright, although that seems absurd. He’s been missing, presumed dead for six months. Of course he’s not going to be alright, even if he is physically healthy. 

There’s a rustle of movement above her. Amy pauses, praying it isn’t a passing nurse as she glances up the cramped stairwell, craning her neck to see who is coming down. Her vision flares black, and she is numbly aware of a rushing sensation before she doesn’t feel that, either. No impact and no pain. Just… black. She is very, very tired all of a sudden, as if she’d just woken up from an extremely stressful dream. But she isn’t waking up.

Not right away, anyways.

When she feels like her eyelids are cooperating again, she opens them. The air and smell is different. It doesn’t feel like the hospital anymore. It doesn’t feel like Hogwarts. The room she is in is entirely unfamiliar. She’s not standing up, but she’s not lying down. She’s slumped in a chair in a corner. There are no windows and no natural light source behind a small patch from under the door. It’s not so dark that she’s blind, but she’s not immediately sure how large the room is, either. Aside from the chair, which looks like a borrowed office chair, faded and worn, the cushion peeling, there is almost no furniture other than what seems like a small desk or table on the opposite wall. There’s a potted plant on the table but it’s been dead for weeks, if not months, wilted and collapsed

She pushes herself out of the chair. She is still wearing the clothes she was before, although her trusty corduroy jacket is slightly askew, and her hair is rumpled. She runs her fingers through it almost awkwardly, as if trying to see if this is a dream or not. She doesn’t feel hurt; there’s no bumps or bruises on her. Her mouth is dry but she doesn’t feel sick, either, just very thirsty and tired. She has no idea what time of day it might be, if it is still evening or not. She moves towards the door. Locked. She reaches for her wand, then realizes it’s gone, as is her purse. 

The noise she makes is not quite a gasp and not quite a sigh, but it is close. Her hands are shaking. Amy makes two fists, squeezes until she feels a flare of rage. Lets them go. No. Not right now. She tries the door again. Still locked. She hasn’t got anything to pick it with. She gets down on her hands and knees and tries to glimpse under it, through the crack. Nothing but muted light, maybe from a hallway? She doesn’t hear anything except the occasional dripping of a pipe somewhere.

She gets back up, takes off her jacket. It’s not cold in the room, although it’s not warm either. It’s just still, and sterile. She still has her shoes on; they are flat and practical, if she has to run she’ll be alright. She glances up at the ceiling, but doesn’t see any vents or panels. The walls don’t feel like cheap plaster that she could try to smash through, they’re sturdy. She sets her jacket down on the chair, approaches the desk, removes the potted plant. The table is heavy, but she can still move it. Slowly but surely she pushes it towards the door, not barricading it but parallel to it. She picks up the plant, plucks out the dried mess of stems and withered leaves, leaves in the dirt. Clambers up onto the table with her jacket in hand, and bundles the ceramic pot inside it. By holding the sleeves of her jacket and tying them across it she can swing it quite easily. 

She waits for a few minutes, but the longer she waits the more she’ll overthink this, the more nervous she might get, so instead she adjusts her crouched position, thankful for her trousers, opens her mouth, and screams as loudly as she can. Waits a few moments, then screams again, raw and loud as possible. Unless this room is sound-proofed, they had to have heard that, reinforced walls and heavy door or not. She hears footsteps, moving quickly, and then they pause outside the door. 

Amy shifts her position again, listening to it slowly unlock. When it swings open from the outside whoever is entering will step directly into her line of sight, barely two feet from her and her makeshift weapon. Her thick jacket will deaden the blow, so they probably won’t die, and the pot is cheap and will break immediately, but she just needs to stun them long enough to get out. The door opens, and she grunts and swings, putting all of the muscle in her shoulders into the blow. 

It connects in a shower of dirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Matthew and Jaime are back! We may get a flashback to what they did over the summer at some point, but it's not crucial for the plot at the moment. As absolutely insane as this scheme is, I just think of all the canon plot arcs in HP and feel better about it. Basically it boils down to temporarily altering Matthew's memories to prevent him from being further obliviated by Tom's cronies. Matthew is obviously putting a lot of trust in Jaime and Slughorn to agree to go along with this, as much as he claims he 'still doesn't trust' Jaime. 
> 
> 2\. Rosario is a Spanish witch who is a very talented legilimens and obliviator, editing memories as if they were movies. She and Jaime have had dealings before. 
> 
> 3\. I felt like it would be good for Mae and Malcolm to have a chat. While their family situations are very different, Malcolm does have experience with shocking revelations within the family, as his mother hid her magic for years from her husband. Malcolm's account of the marriage is partially accurate and partially a product of the times they are living in; his parents were born in the 1910s or 1920s. 
> 
> 4\. Mae feels very muddled and confused this chapter; her initial rage towards Amy has flared out but she's overwhelmed with mixed feelings about her father, and frustrated that she will never be able to 'prove' whether he is one way or another to herself. While she doesn't want to contact Tom, her curiosity inevitably overrides her grudge against her mother, and she makes a very meager attempt at an apology to Amy, who is just relieved that Mae is talking to her again.
> 
> 5\. Amy tries to be more open with Mae this chapter, although she omits certain things like the existence of the Basilisk (which is probably a good idea). She is hoping to give Mae a more 'complete picture' of what her relationship with Tom was like... while censoring it for a child, obviously. Again, Amy's account is naturally biased and has likely changed over time in how she frames it to herself.
> 
> 6\. "What happened at the end of this chapter?! What is going on?!" Last chapter Tom received a tip that Slughorn was going to attempt to bring Matthew back into magical Britain, is what happened, and decided this was how he was going to get Amy alone, knowing she would be guilt-ridden and impulsive and want to see Matthew immediately to make sure he was alright. Amy, meanwhile, is having a Jason Bourne moment. 
> 
> 7\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/) if you want to discuss this fic or send prompts.


	30. Amy XIII

UNKNOWN, NOVEMBER 1958

The man at her feet is a stranger; close cropped brown hair, big ears, young face, groaning and clutching his head, his wand gripped tightly in one hand. She brings her her heel down hard on his right hand before he can try to clamber up, and he gasps in pain, letting go. Amy grabs at it, he grabs at her, their foreheads bounce off each other painfully, but she reels away with the wand in hand, scuttling backwards across the dusty floor like a crab as he tries to stagger towards her, working his way up to a shout.

“Stupefy!” she hisses, trying to keep her own voice down, and he drops like a sack of potatoes. 

His wand feels foreign and uncomfortable in her hand, an alien object subject to strange tremors and odd twitches, as it can sense she is not its master. But it’s better than nothing. If her own has been destroyed or stolen for good, she’s going to be- she doesn’t know what she’s going to be, she needs to focus. She steps over his unconscious body, leaving her now filthy jacket on the floor along with the remains of the pot, and closes the door behind her. There’s a simple deadbolt on it, although she assumes it may have been enchanted as well. She locks it just to delay him; her stunner was weak and he will be back on his feet within a few minutes. 

Amy illuminates the wand and continues down the hall. Given the construction she feels that they are in a house, and an old one. There might be muffling charms on it, but she can’t hear any traffic outside, and with all the rooms apparently locked up, she’s not sure if she’s still in London or somewhere else. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’d taken her out of the city. She pauses when she gets to the end of the darkened hall and concentrates on apparating back to Hogsmeade; it’s very difficult without a wand, but it is possible. Nothing. That’s out, then.

The stairs are a risk, as someone will see or hear her coming down them before she can see them, but there is nowhere else to go. Amy hugs the wall, trying to avoid creaking floorboards, and keeps one hand sliding along the slick, dusty banister behind her. She reaches the bottom without incident, and finds herself in what seems like a foyer of sorts. The windows reveal only the blackness of night, no lights. They can’t be in a city. If she had to guess, this was a house out in the countryside somewhere. It vaguely reminds her of the Morgans’, from what seems like a lifetime ago, but whoever used to live here must have had far more money than them. It looks Georgian, or was it Regency? She can never remember, she didn’t take Muggle Studies.

She does see a front door, though. Amy drops the pretense of being stealthy and moves for it, scrambling with the lock. 

She yanks it open, darts forward- and crosses over the ward marked on the front porch, which immediately glows a sickly shade of blue and tosses her bodily backwards. Amy lands flat on her back with a muffled shriek, the wand flying out of her grip, and rolling to a stop at someone’s polished leather shoes. 

Tom stands in the archway leading from the foyer to some other room- the kitchen, maybe? She has not seen him in person in over nine months. It is still almost as jarring as when she first saw him in Edgar Prince’s study. She is looking for mannerisms that no longer exist. As a boy he would have still slouched slightly, leant against the doorframe, sardonic and unimpressed, a haughty expression on his sharp-featured face. The man’s face is unreadable to her, still. He seems to have made himself at home; he isn’t wearing his robes or even a jacket, and there is light spilling out of the room behind him. 

He doesn’t lower himself to pick up the stolen wand; he crooks a finger and it haltingly rises up into his grasp. Amy has backed away until she is in the farmhouse’s doorway; she knows the ward line is still behind her and she can’t just run outside again, but it is comforting to feel the night air at her back. The door slams shut as if propelled by a strong gust of wind, pushing her forward. Amy reaches up, grips the rusted handle with a clammy hand, and pulls herself to her feet. Someone is slamming themselves against a door upstairs, a steady THUMP THUMP THUMP.

“Stay here,” Tom says, and ascends the stairwell, the wand in hand. 

Amy does not stay here. 

She runs into the room full of light, which is really just a dining room, only the table is broken- the chandelier above it collapsed at some point, and while it is still illuminated by magic, flickering with contained flames that make the room an almost hellish shade of orange and yellow, it is simply resting, listing, really, atop the fractured wooden table. Amy skirts around it and darts into what must be the kitchen, looking for a back exit. There is muffled conversation upstairs, then a crack. He’s letting some select people apparate in and out, apparently. Amy wrenches open the back door, jumps down from the crumbling wooden stoop, and barely avoids being forced backwards again as the ward activates. She can’t go more than a foot further; it’s like coming into contact with an invisible wall. 

There’s nowhere to go but back inside. Amy lets out a few curses, and once inside the kitchen, tears the heavy drawers apart, looking for something, anything, to defend herself with. She can hear him on the stairs. There’s no knives or utensils left, not even a soup ladle. What she would give for a frying pan. The best she can come up with is a jagged piece of what was once a fine blue and white china plate. She’s trying to test its cutting capacity on the back of her hand when he appears once more. 

“This is getting a little sad,” Tom observes, as if he were watching her struggle to open a jar of pickles. Amy looks up at him, the sneering look on his handsome face, and sees red. This isn’t fair. This isn’t fair. She’s done everything she could, this isn’t fair, how dare he use her friends against her like this, how dare he take her away from Mae, this isn’t fair, why now- she hurls the broken plate at his head. He ducks, and she lowers her shoulders and flat-out charges him. Her only hope now is to catch him off guard long enough to get her hands on his wand. 

Amy isn’t sure if he is genuinely shocked to see her barrel towards him like a bull, elbows out, or if he simply thinks he can stop her with a spell before she reaches him, but she collides into his body all the same. It doesn’t knock him off his feet; he’s a six foot tall man in reasonably good shape, and she is a five foot three woman who does not have enough sheer muscle to overpower him, but he does stumble backwards, off balance, and in an effort to not go crashing into the broken chandelier and table, turns his body, which is enough to send him slipping to the floor. Amy lands roughly atop him, an elbow slamming into his stomach, knocking the breath out of him. 

He shoves her off; her head collides with a table leg, and she rears back and kicks furiously at the hand reaching for her; his left, not his wand hand, to her disappointment. She doesn’t hear anything crack but he shouts in pain, clutching it to his chest, and she staggers back to her feet and aims another heavy kick, this time at his chest; he grabs her foot instead and comes away with her shoe. Amy trips backward, slipping, then takes off her other shoe and throws it at him as he gets to his feet, shaking with fury. 

“Stop it,” he says, in the tone of an enraged father at his wit’s end with a misbehaving child throwing a tantrum in public. “Right now.” He’s so angry his voice is trembling like the boy he once was. 

“Give me back my wand, you stupid fuck!” she snarls back at him. “Then we can have that nice chat you wanted me here for- what, bored with the desk job already, Tom?”

His jaw twitches; he holds out a hand and speaks under his breath, and the force of the spell hits her hard enough to send her sprawling back on the floor. She rolls out the way of his next curse, half-under the half-collapsed dining room table, then aims another kick at him, panting, when he makes to drag her out from under it. He steps back, swearing himself, and she feels something pull hard on her left leg, as if an unseen hook had rooted itself into the leg of her trousers. It pulls her forward, sharply, like a fish on a line, and she grabs onto the nearest unsteady table leg, ignoring the splinters it leaves in her shaking hands. 

Something wooden creaks, she sucks in a breath, and then he bodily drops to his knees and rips her out of the way as the table completely collapses, sending up a cloud of dust where she’d been lying just moments before. The chandelier flickers again, but stays lit. He he has one arm locked around her waist, the other braced against the floorboards, is down on one knee, the other leg bent and raised, level underneath his chin. She can feel his warm breath on her face, and his pale face is tinted orange and yellow from the lights, like one of those modern, oversaturated paintings dripping with color.

Something prods against her sternum. She’s not seen him point his wand at her in years, but he must feel he cannot trust wandless magic to overpower her unless he wants to simply stun her unconscious. Amy realizes that her chest is moving up and down very rapidly, like a rabbit cornered in the brush. She’s not scared. She will not be scared. She is not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing her frightened again. “You need to calm down,” he says. “This kind of behavior is completely uncalled for. I am not going to hurt you.” He speaks clipped and stiltedly, as if afraid he might say more without thinking.

“That’s funny,” Amy breathes, “silly me, thinking the man who had me abducted from a hospital stairwell might want to hurt me!”

“I know you like to think of yourself as above the law- I have to assume Dumbledore has rubbed off on you,” he says, “but it is, in fact, illegal to sneak into a hospital through an authorized personnel-only entrance, with the intention of breaking into a patient’s room.”

“That’s you, Mister Law Abiding,” she says almost hysterically, wondering if this might actually be a dream. 

His wand is leaving an indentation, even through the thick wool of her sweater top. 

“If you’d actually been caught by a healer, you would be in a holding cell at the Ministry right now,” he retorts. “If anything, you should thank me for sparing you the trouble of having to secure bail.”

It occurs to her that only he could make a kidnapping out to somehow consist of him doing someone a favor out of the kindness of his shriveled little carcass of a heart.

“Yeah, you’ve always had a thing for that, me thanking you,” she sneers. 

He adjusts his position, standing up and easily pulling her up with him. Amy tries to jerk out of his tight grip on her upper arm, and when that fails, attempts to stomp on his feet and kick at his shins, but in pantyhose the effect is more pathetic than anything else. “If you can’t get ahold of yourself,” he says lowly in her ear, “I will lock your legs and you can sit on the floor like a child.”

“Go to hell,” she snaps, but she’s not tall enough to headbutt him, not strong enough to force him to release her, and whenever she tries to grab at his wand arm he easily moves it away, leveraging the difference in sheer size between them to keep her from snatching it. A strange noise comes out of her throat. It’s not a cry or a whimper, exactly, just some expression of frustration and anger and an increasingly steady throb of hopelessness. She does not have a wand. She doesn’t know where she is, and she can’t get out of this house, even if she could break free of him, she has nowhere to run. 

His claim that he doesn’t intend to hurt her is not calming her in the slightest. Mae. Where is Mae? If someone took her- she doubts he did it himself, he’d want his hands clean in case it was interrupted- than someone might have taken Mae. Is it still Friday? Mae should be abed in the Ravenclaw Tower, fast sleep. What will happen if she goes to Amy’s office tomorrow, she’s not there? Will she go to Dumbledore immediately, or assume Amy spent the night with Teddy and Patsy? Will she think Amy’s somehow run off on her? What if she runs into Carmody or her husband, what if she sneaks off the grounds and goes into Hogsmeade to look for Amy? 

What if she’s hurt? What if he’s hurt her, and Amy just doesn’t know it yet? He sits her in a chair beside the rubble of the table, and then, seeing that she appears to be in a proper state, not quite crying, but close, seems to feel comfortable enough to leave her there without restraining her, and draws up his own chair, as if they were old friends settling in for tea and a nice chat.

Amy stares at her shoeless feet, covered in dirt and dust. Her hands are bleeding from the splinters, dotted with red like an ink splatter. He leans forward and then stops when she recoils against the loose arm of the chair, as far as physically possible away from him without jumping out of her seat. She belatedly realizes that her cheeks are wet. For a moment he seems about to speak, to mock her further or offer some little apology they both know he doesn’t mean, but then he just takes her injured hand instead, gripping it firmly when she tries to wrench it away.

“Stop it,” she says, “I can fix them myself- stop it! Tom!” There is something very strange going on, she decides. This is just like when they were in that study together. There is Amy, the adult woman who should be straight-faced and sober, staring him down without flinching, prepared for whatever is about to come. And then there is Amy, the sixteen year old girl, squabbling with him like they were schoolchildren again, saying his name in that almost girlish tone- stop it, Tom!- as if he’d stolen her quill or said something mildly offensive. 

He seems almost startled by it as well, to her disgust. He draws out two splinters with his wand, but doesn’t seem to know how to mend the cuts; she’s not surprised. When has he ever had to heal himself? It’s beneath him. She pulls her hand away, and clenches the other into a fist, draws it up under her chin protectively. “It’s fine,” she says through her teeth. “Let go.”

After another moment, he does, and pockets his wand. When he seems to have gotten back to his original train of thought, he straightens almost formally, as if presenting a case to court, and says, “I suppose you’re wondering why you’re here.”

Amy keeps her lips pressed together in an unyielding line. He wants a response, and she is not going to give it to him. She glances down at his hand. He’s wearing the ring. Good. Thank Merlin. He still thinks it’s the real thing. Unconsciously, she must relax ever so slightly, because he scowls, and then says, “If I thought you’d be reasonable about it, I wouldn’t have to do it this way. But since you’ve been content to hide behind Dumbledore’s skirts for the past year-,”

“Is Teddy alright?” she asks, voice hard as a stone.

He stops, almost blinks. “Teddy-,”

“Edward O’Neill. I know you must have forced him to write that letter, telling me Matthew was at St Mungo’s. Where is he? If you’ve hurt him-,”

He exhales in annoyance. “I haven’t laid a hand on Edward O’Neill-,”

“Right, I’ve heard that one before-,”

“Or his wife,” Tom snaps, “or their darling little boy.” 

Amy closes her mouth, thinks of Patsy in that freshly painted green kitchen and Paul in his high chair. “I didn’t instruct him to write that letter,” Tom says, acidly. “I allowed information to leak confirming Abbott’s admittance to the hospital, and let your little gossip mill follow through. Naturally, you decided to pay him a visit, and it wasn’t exactly difficult, Amy, to have someone keeping watch-,”

“Leave Matthew be,” she interrupts him. “Enough. You’ve done enough-,”

“I don’t see how it’s my fault that he nearly got himself blown up in some Spanish slum,” Tom says coldly.

“Don’t play stupid, it doesn’t suit you,” she retorts. “You know exactly what you did, you- he has a life! He has a wife and a child, and you have no right to- to toy with it because you got yourself all worked up over some- some sick, pathetic little grudge because he was kind to me, once!”

“Kind to you?” Tom scoffs. “Don’t make me laugh. Do you actually believes he gives a damn about some adolescent fling from ten years ago? I imagine you still wonder about it, don’t you, if you’d just strung him along a little longer- it must kill you, getting a Christmas card from them every year, knowing you might have had that if you just played your cards right- Let’s not mince words, Amy. He was slumming it.”

She remembers that day in the library very well, spitting it in his face. 

_You know what you are to her? The closest she can get to slumming it. So really, I pity you, I do, Tom_.

She just looks at him for a moment, the way he once did at her, not sure if she is actually wounded or simply waiting for the next blow. 

“It’s alright,” Tom says. “I know you pride yourself on your unconventional little life, Amy. No harm done, I suppose. Don’t tell me that one actually hurt.” He is even leaning towards her slightly, as if awaiting her reply, an almost eager gleam in his dark eyes, wanting to see her scream and curse and call him a thousand names, as she might have when they were children.

“Did you really bring me here just to threaten me again?” she asks instead, calmly. “Or were you just bored, Tom? Most politicians have hobbies, you know. You could take up golf.”

“I’m not here to threaten you,” he says. “I wanted to ask you a question, actually. Given the subject matter I felt like a letter might be inappropriate.” He is tensed again, as if he might really be waiting with bated breath for her answer.

Amy just blinks at him; her eyes feel sore and tired.

“Why did you keep it?” he asks. “The child.”

The wave of terror is hard to break through. Where is Mae? “Tom,” she says hoarsely. “Please. She has nothing to do with-,”

“Just answer the question,” he says, sharply.

“Tom.” She feels she needs to make the appeal, a second time. She’d hoped it would only be the once. “This isn’t- please. Please. Whatever you brought me here for- if you need some- some favor, I can do it, please don’t- leave her out of this, you promised-,” He made no such promise, but she has nothing to lose by claiming he did, “you promised you wouldn’t hurt her, I haven’t done anything-,”

“Answer the question!” He almost shouts it, his voice ringing through the room, drowning out even the faint pops and crackles of the flames.

“Because I didn’t know until it was too late to even decide,” she says, closing her eyes for a moment, shutting him out, holding her fear in, “and I couldn’t- I couldn’t give her up once I had her in my arms. Before I even loved her. She was mine. I never had anything all mine before. I saw her face and I knew.”

“She was mine.” For a moment she thinks he is just mockingly echoing her. Then she opens her eyes and sees his face, and she knows.

He knows.

Amy braces herself for the explosion, but it’s a slow boil instead. He swallows almost jerkily, loosens his collar slightly, and stands up. She stays seated. There is nowhere else to go. He paces around the length of the broken table and the glowing chandelier, like some large animal stalking around a fire, a bear or a wolf or a lion. When he comes back around, his eyes are lit up with rage, like burning coal.

“She was mine,” he says. “My child. And you took her away from me. You kept her away. From me. From us. We-,” he exhales shakily, it almost sounds like a laugh of disbelief. “I… you hated me by then, I suppose. But to the degree of- she was mine. And you were content to let me- to keep her from me. Forever. All to yourself.”

“You’re wrong,” she says, “she’s not- her father was a muggle, alright, he was just some muggle-,”

“Don’t you fucking lie to me,” he spits. “You said it yourself. I never had anything all mine before. You’re bad at this, Amy. You contradict yourself. You had me. You had me, but that wasn’t enough for you, was it-,”

“Shut up,” Amy breathes.

“No, I wasn’t enough for you, because I- I dared to try to give you something, a life, is that it, I dared to try to pull us both out of the hellhole we were born into, and you couldn’t have that, could you? No. You- you are a stupid, ignorant, lying child, still. You didn’t want anything you couldn’t steal, and hide, and pore over in the dark-,”

“Do you even hear yourself?” she shouts, pushing herself up out of the chair, too furious to think straight. “You- that is you, Tom! To the bloody core! A child! Throwing a fit because someone stole his toy, took his dollie away! You didn’t give a fuck what I wanted! You wanted it all! And I could have you, and nothing else! Nothing! A one course meal,” she says contemptuously, gesturing at the broken table, “The instant I so much as looked anywhere else-,”

“Looked?” he shouts back at her. “You did a lot more than look! I gave you everything! Everything I had-,”

“I DIDN’T WANT IT!” she screams, until her throat is burning. “I didn’t want it! I told you! Again! And again! I told you I was finished! I didn’t want to sit at your fucking table anymore! I didn’t want to hold your hand! I didn’t want to-,”

“You wanted me plenty of times after that,” he says, viciously, “when you were on the floor of that barn, you wanted me then-,”

“God, you must wish he’d done worse than beat me bloody, so you could swoop into save the day!” she spits. “That’s what you wanted, right? To crack his skull open while I clung to your legs, weeping! You are fucking deranged! You are an animal! That is all you know, Tom! You want things, you take them! You’re hungry, you eat! You can hide it behind all the suits and ties and silk robes you like, but you are so bloody simple!”

“Shut your mouth,” he snarls, and oh, he’s lost that posh new accent now, “you shut your mouth-,”

“You make me sick to my stomach,” she hisses, pressing towards him, not backing away. “You do! You can’t get it through your thick skull, can you, why I might have decided you’d be a piss poor father! Why in God’s name would I ever let someone like you raise a child with me?”

A window shatters behind them; neither so much as flinches. Amy isn’t sure whose wild magic it was, but she hopes it was her. 

“You had no right to raise her like that, away from her father, cooped up in some back-alley clinic where you operated on common thugs and criminals,” he seethes. “No right. No court in the world would agree with you-,”

“Any court in the world ought to put you in prison!”

“Right, Saint Amy, how could I forget-,”

“I am not a saint, but I’m a damn sight better than a fucking monster!”

He silences her with a wordless spell; Amy feels her mouth open and shut like a fish, but clenches her fists at her sides and takes another step closer to him, trying to goad him into releasing the charm so he can scream at her and she can shriek back at her.

“Does she know?” he asks. “Look at me. Does she know her father is a monster, Amy? Does she know what you did?”

She shoves at him with both hands, her palms collided with his chest in a satisfying thunk. He releases the spell. “No,” Amy says hoarsely, mouth dry. “She doesn’t know. I hope she never knows.”

He looks at her, gives a little nod, and says, “You’re a liar. She was at my wedding. She heard me speaking Parseltongue.”

Amy backs up in horror. “No- that’s not- no, she didn’t-,”

“She did,” says Tom. “I almost caught her. I didn’t realize who it was spying on me until later. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose. You’ve done her a disservice in more ways than one.”

“Don’t you dare,” Amy begins, furiously, “you have no right to lecture me as if-,”

“As if what? As if I was her father?” he barks. 

“You are not her-,”

“I AM.”

“You weren’t there,” Amy hisses. “You don’t even know her. You will never know her. Understand? She is nothing like you-,”

“You can be quiet or I can silence you again,” he threatens, and she makes an obscene hand gesture, half turning from him.

He grabs her by the shoulder, spinning her back around to face him. “I am her father,” Tom says. “She is my daughter. My blood. If you’d had even a modicum of sense, if you hadn’t been so blinded, you would have come back home. To me. And we would have raised her together, like a proper family, and we would have been happy. You’ve ruined that. Do you understand? You have ruined her life.”

“I saved her life,” Amy spits. “You confirmed that for me as soon as you threatened to kill her.”

He flares, but seems to restrain himself. “I didn’t know.”

“And that makes it alright?” She rages, “You didn’t know? You threatened to murder an innocent child. Because at heart you’re a thin-skinned, greedy bastard who can’t get over the fact that Daddy didn’t want you.”

“And you’re a bitch,” he says. “A selfish, scheming bitch who thought she could outwit me. You should have left her on a doorstep if this isn’t what you wanted, like your mother did you.”

Amy slaps him so hard that his head moves to the side; this time he doesn’t laugh coldly or smile mockingly, but immediately slaps her back. 

For a moment the only sound is that of the enchanted flames hissing in the chandelier, and the creaking of the house around them. His eyes widen.

She socks him in the jaw as hard as possible, and immediately regrets it from the flare of pain in her knuckles. He grabs her by the arms, and she knees him in the groin without hesitation. He gasps, face draining of any color, she wrenches away, he grabs her by the hair. Amy throws an elbow at his face, and misses his nose, to her dismay, colliding with his mouth instead, splitting his lower lip. 

He pulls her back, nails scratching at her scalp, and she shoves at him again, spitting and screaming. They topple to the floor in an ungainly mess, half on top of one another. He tries to pin her and she responds by clawing at his face, raking her nails under his left eye. He shouts, she tries to extricate herself from him, but he settles his weight atop her legs, and manages to pin her arms above her head with one hand. That hand is shaking very badly from adrenaline. It is taking him actual effort to physically subdue her, nothing like tossing hexes around. 

Amy stares up at him; his lower lip is swollen and bleeding, and the scratches under his eye are bright red. Her scalp aches and her cheek stings, but he seems worse off to her. He has arranged himself so that he is arched over her, his knees pinning down her legs, his face looming over hers. His weight is beginning to hurt. For an instant she wonders if he is going to kiss her again, and realizes in horror that she is almost furiously hoping he will try so she can bite him. She wants him to be pathetic and childish. She wants him to prove her right. She wants him to want her so she can tell him how much she hates him, how much she despises him, pities him.

But she doesn’t pity him anymore. She did once, but there is nothing to pity now. To her pity would indicate some measure of excusal or forgiveness, some indulgence, as if he were the misbehaving little boy making a fool of himself when company is over. 

He does not kiss her, and she wonders then instead if he is about to take his other hand and put it around her throat and squeeze. He’s made a fist with it instead, white-knuckled. She turns her head slightly so that when the blow lands it will be on the cheek, not square on the nose or mouth. His hit is going to do a lot more damage than hers, and while she can heal a broken nose, teeth will be more difficult if he knocks a few out. 

“Stop it,” he says, as if she were the one in control. Maybe she is. This is completely absurd. It’s ludicrous. He’s behaving as if he doesn’t have a wand, as if he could not simply incapacitate her with a few words. He could simply imperius her, sit her down in a chair, and make her listen to him rant and rave for hours on end. He’s never had some chivalrous desire to ‘fight fair’ before. So what is it? Is this what he wanted all along, an excuse for them to brawl like they were eight years old again, in the garden at Wool’s? 

He releases the fist and smooths back her hair, which is a tangled mess falling into her eyes. Amy flinches from the warmth of his hand, his fingers on her face. Her heart is jackhammering in her chest. He moves off her legs and slowly releases her arms. She sits up, but is too exhausted to scramble away or start in on him again. Her lower back is in agony from being tossed backwards by the ward, her feet are killing her, her hands still hurt from the splinters, and her knuckles are split from punching him. Her head is pounding and her eyes are watering. 

They are sitting on the floor like children, mere inches from one another.

“If that was it,” she says shortly, “I want to go home now.”

That itself is almost a challenge. He can’t actually mean to keep her here indefinitely. They’ve still got nearly two months left of the term. Dumbledore might not suspect anything right away, it being the weekend, but Mae will certainly notice if she’s up and disappeared for over a day. She does not want to consider the possibility that Tom is well aware of this, and does not care. She knows he isn’t going to kill her; he’s made it patently obvious that he considers that a mercy she doesn’t deserve. He might not see anything wrong with simply removing her from her everyday life, though. Or rather, he might see it as a fitting punishment for her perceived betrayals. 

“I want you to stop lying,” he says, after a moment.

“I’m not your wife,” she bites back, “I don’t owe you honesty.”

“Then I want you to know,” he says, “that I don’t blame her for what you’ve done. She’s an innocent child. You said it yourself.”

Amy says nothing; what, does he expect gratitude for the bare minimum of decency, if that? It only came into play when he realized he had some claim to Mae. 

“I don’t want her to have a difficult life,” he said. “But I expect us to cooperate together on that.”

As if they’re discussing some- some Ministry initiative, as if she were some colleague!

“For now,” he says, “I think it best that we not make any drastic changes.”

“There is no ‘we’,” she says, in a low, hateful voice. “There is only you, Tom.”

“Then I’ll stop couching my language,” he snaps, “if I had no care at all for my political reputation or my relationship with Lydia-,” 

Amy snorts, loudly, at that.

“-I could have you in court next week, stripped of your rights as her mother. Every law on the books favors me. Do you understand? In both muggle and magical court. I am her father. I am married. I have a home. A successful career. I could give her a much more stable and safe life than you have.”

“Do you hear yourself?” she asks, incredulously, finally looking him right in the eyes. She is stunned by the fervor there, as if he actually believes what he’s saying. “A stable and safe- you are a murderer, Tom. You surround yourself with pureblood fanatics and corrupt aurors and hit wizards and dirty lawyers and accountants. You are married to a hothouse flower, and Merlin knows how you treat that poor girl behind closed doors.”

He jerks back as if stung. “You have no right to say how I-,”

She turns the other cheek to him, literally.

“What my wife and I have,” he says, after a moment, “is very different from what I- what I ever had with you.”

“I’m sure,” Amy sneers. “She doesn’t need nearly as much correction as I did, is that it? It must be so relaxing for you, really. Not having to contend with someone else’s free will. A real reprieve from your busy schedule!”

“You’re right,” he snaps, “it’s certainly a relief being able to take a drink from someone and be reasonably certain it isn’t poisoned. Or to-,” he cuts himself off, to her satisfaction.

“Is that why we’re here?” Amy says angrily, glancing around the room. “To draw up some demented custody agreement on the sly? Here’s my answer, Tom: you stay the hell away from my daughter.”

“I should have gone after you,” he says, in what he likely imagines is an even, measured tone, ever the reasonable one, Tom is. “I should have never let it escalate to this level.”

“You would have had to drag me back kicking and screaming.”

“Well, that doesn’t seem to have changed at all!”

“And whose FAULT is that?” Amy shouts. “You’re supposed to be a smart man- how are you not making the connection, Tom? It’s not enough for someone to love you! You have to be good for them! No part of you was good for me! No part of you is good for her!”

He stops, quite literally stops, like a windup toy stalling out. 

“Don’t,” she begins, but it’s a weak threat, and he must know it. She should never have said that. That is the most dangerous thing she has said all night. 

“You said you loved me,” he says after a moment, “when you left. But that was a lie. Wasn’t it? You didn’t love me anymore.”

“Yes,” she says, although it comes out more as a whisper, in contrast to her bellows just moments earlier.

“That was a lie,” he repeats himself, almost furiously. “Wasn’t it? It was a lie, Amy! You didn’t love me, because if you did- if you cared about me at all then you never would have left me like that! Isn’t that right? Tell me. Tell me that’s right!” It’s as if he’s desperate to hear it again, to play back the moment like a film reel.

“That’s right,” she lies. “I didn’t love you. I just- I don’t know why I said it. To make myself feel better, maybe. I didn’t love you-,”

His face crumples; it almost startles her, to see the stony man momentarily transformed into something recognizable, misshapen and young and raw, like a lump of clay. “You’ve always been a bad liar,” he says, and sounds almost wounded. “You-,” his breathing escalates rapidly, as if he’s about to go into a panic, and then he turns from her and with a slash of his wand completely demolishes the splintered wooden remains of the table, as if taking a chainsaw to them.

A cloud of choking dust rises up, and dissipates almost as quickly. 

“You loved me,” he says, “and you left anyways.”

“You said you loved me,” Amy says, “and you kept hurting me anyways.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he sounds like he wants to retch, “I didn’t- I was trying to do what was best for both of us. I- I always apologized, I changed for you, I would have kept changing for you-,”

“No,” says Amy, “not in any good ways. Sometimes I really wonder if everyone would have been better off if you’d never known me in the first place, because- because you always did the worst things when you said it was for me, Tom. Always.” She gets to her feet, and he matches her.

“You loved me,” he says, as if he must repeat it to himself. “Why would you do that?”

“Love you?” I don’t know, she thinks. I don’t know what is wrong with me. 

“Why would you _leave_?”

“Tom,” Amy says, exhausted with his forced ignorance. “You know why.”

“No!” He sounds like a toddler, stomping his foot in denial of the obvious. Like Mae when she did not want to eat her carrots as a girl of three.

“You do,” she says, and finds she does not have the energy to even raise her voice anymore. “You do know why.”

“We would have been happy together,” he insists, furiously. “We would have been a family!”

“I’m not your family. You don’t have a family,” she replies, cold and flat. “You don’t know _how_ to have a family.”

“Then what would you call it,” he hisses.

“A cage,” she says, plainly. “You know it, and I know it.”

“You don’t know what a cage is,” he rages; she raises an eyebrow at him, and then goes to collect her shoes, which are scattered across the floor.

“You like ultimatums,” Amy says, as she slips them back on, “so here’s one for you. I want to be back in Hogsmeade by midnight.”

“You think I’m scared of Dumbledore?”

 _Yes_ , she thinks, but instead says, “I think you’re scared of a lot of things. Be sensible, Tom. This isn’t what you want. You’ve got important votes coming up. You can’t be flitting about trying to keep Hogwarts off your back while managing your staff. You need to release me before there’s a big fuss and loads of inquiries from the Board of Governors about a missing professor. Mae needs me.” If he had her, this is when he would throw it in her face.

Tom says nothing, a dark outline behind her as she straightens her top and combs her fingers through her hair. 

Then he tosses something at her; Amy turns and catches her wand, nearly fumbling it when she hears him verbally release the wards. He vanishes without so much as a popping sound; he was always a very good apparater. She stands there, stunned it actually worked. She thought she’d have to spend another hour arguing and wearing him down, but maybe he never intended to keep her here for very long at all. With the caster gone, the chandelier dies out, leaving her in a darkened dining room full of broken dishes and shattered windows and dust and rubble. 

She thinks sadly of her jacket upstairs, then apparates away before he can change his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Unsurprisingly the chapters that exclusively focus on Tom and Amy interacting are the easiest and quickest for me to write because I'm the most used to their dynamic. And as many people pointed out back during their first meeting (nearly a year ago in the fic at this point), when they are alone together in many ways they both revert to a more childish, petty dynamic and almost seem to forget they are full fledged adults and not bickering teenagers. 
> 
> 2\. The fact that this fight about family, children, and what could have been takes place in a literally ruined house, and that their main confrontation occurs in an actual dining room, around a broken family dinner table, is not a coincidence. (Also, Tom should consider going into set design. Lighting the collapsed chandelier was a nice touch).
> 
> 3\. It feels weird to think about but despite this fic being 30 chapters Tom and Amy have actually only met in person 3 times, and the last time was over 9 months ago in-fic. Sometimes I feel like I am 'forcing' their interactions but if they interacted even less... we would have no plot haha. As it stands I think this follows what they've established as their adult dynamic; Tom forces the interaction and by all accounts, has the upper hand, but his seeming reluctant to do actual physical harm to Amy, or even to pry into her thoughts, means she consistently gains the advantage over him. She even realizes in this chapter that he is not going to kill her, and that he would be reluctant to hurt Mae as well, viewing her as a part of him. 
> 
> 4\. One of my favorite things about Amy is that she is a physical person and forces Tom to be more physical as well. I don't necessarily mean in terms of sex but in terms of her being utterly unafraid to outright charge him, throw a punch, or even dinner plates and her shoes. Amy has no qualms about looking stupid or unsophisticated in a fight and she constantly catches him off guard when he is monologuing and she is looking for something to stab him with. Even when scared Amy is the type to go down kicking and screaming and I think she would do pretty well for herself in most horror movies, despite being a physically smaller person.
> 
> 5\. Tom was waiting years to throw back the 'she's slumming it with you!' comment that Amy made to him when they were fighting about him dating Irene Greengrass back in her face. Yes, he is that petty and immature. 
> 
> 6\. This is the second time in a year that Amy has split Tom's lip! Let's keep it up, Ames!
> 
> 7\. Amy's big mistake towards the end here was freely admitting that she loved Tom, even when plotting to leave him, and left anyways still being in love with him. This is a major 'does not compute' for Tom and I would argue it stuns him even more than the realization that Mae is his daughter did. We've talked about it before in the comments but he cannot comprehend of loving someone but also feeling a need to abandon that person, even for what are objectively good reasons, because Tom has no sense of objectivity in his personal relationships. He had to believe that Amy didn't love him as much as he had to believe that Mae was not his child, because the alternative- the open acknowledgement that Amy did love him but left anyways because of his behavior- is too painful to bear.
> 
> 8\. Next chapter will be from Lydia's POV, I'm 90% sure! As always you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	31. Lydia VI

LONDON, NOVEMBER 1958

“Stop squirming,” Lydia says crossly, dabbing as delicately as she can at the dried blood on his mouth. She could simply morph into a taller stature to do this more efficiently, but their bathroom, while spacious enough for a townhouse, is not quite large enough to comfortably contend with two six foot tall figures, so instead he is sitting on the edge of the very expensive tub.

With his thin knees knocked together and his shoulders hunched, face all scratched up, he calls more to mind a sullen schoolboy who’d just been dragged away from a fist-fight by the ear, not a grown man. There is something endearing about it; his hair is a little askew, the gel washed out by the autumn rain outside, and he’s scowling to himself as though he’s trying to remember something important. 

She tosses the cotton ball aside. She’s hopeless with healing magic, so he’s going to have to steel himself and put on some foundation come Monday, if the scratches haven’t faded. The swollen lower lip can probably be passed off as a love bite, although she thinks that would be just as difficult for him to countenance. Lydia is well aware of when he decides to… spend a night out. He’s more considerate of a wife’s feelings than Lyle would be, doesn’t flaunt it or come back drunk, but she knows what his favorite’s perfume smells like, at this point. Cheap and reeking of artificial roses, but potent all the same. 

He does not smell like her tonight. What he smells like is an old house and dust and rubbing alcohol, because that’s what she’s been using on him. He jerks away as she passes over the scratches, grabs her wrist in warning. There’s more blood under his nails. She wonders if he killed someone. Lydia, of course, has absolutely no proof that Tom has ever ordered anyone’s death, been involved in covering up anyone’s death, or personally participated in anyone’s death. But a girl’s allowed to have her suspicions. She could believe it of him. She could believe just about anything of him, as they approach six months of marriage.

It’s not a resentment, not exactly. She doesn’t loathe him. She’s afraid of him, sometimes, she can admit that, but she doesn’t hate him, or even really dislike him. Often he is still very much like the man who so charmingly courted her, the man who she amused herself with by pretending it was real, indulging in the fantasy, for a little while. What surprises her, now, is what he is willing to let her see. He still holds himself very much apart, but- every so often something slips out, or he comes home like this and does not send her away when she offers to help him clean up. 

The scratches, though, are from a woman. Lydia has scratched and screamed and kicked before. Those are from a woman clawing at him, to get away. Whoever she was, she didn’t have the long painted nails one might expect of a prostitute, either. There’s no flecks of paint left on his skin and the scratches aren’t deep enough, they’re shallow and short. She had short, stubby, unvarnished nails, and from the angle, she was quite short herself, and must have to physically lean up and forwards to claw at him, unless he was on top of her. 

She tosses aside another cotton ball, looks over his handsome, unlined face with a critical eye. He’s not drunk, and despite it verging on midnight his eyes are bright and alert. He looks angry, but not with her; she can feel it prickling off him like a static shock. Without much preamble she sits down in his lap, ignoring the bare-boned survival instinct shouting at her to get away. If he was going to take whatever it was out on her, he would have worked himself into a fury by now, or found some excuse to be hateful towards her while she was tending to him. 

You catch more flies with honey, anyways. 

He tolerates it, adjusts his position to better balance her weight, spreading his knees slightly. Lydia locks an arm around the back of his neck so she doesn’t topple them both backwards into the bath. “Dare I ask?” she says archly. “Or is it official business, then? She did a number on you, whoever the night’s entertainment was.” 

She has some idea of who ‘she’ might be, but after last time she’s not going to breathe a word of it unless he brings it up himself. It’s clearly quite the sore subject. Not only did he not know about the child, she suspects their… separation… was not his idea in the first place, either. Even had he wanted to break it off with someone like that, Tom would want it his way, on his terms. She must have really done a number on him to get him so worked up about it even years later. 

He says nothing for a moment, staring blankly past her at the mirror above the sink, then turns and rests his chin on her shoulder, almost like a child seeking comfort, to her surprise. “I’m sorry I was late,” he said. “I don’t like to think of you home alone for hours on end.” 

It’s the most mechanical, stilted lie, but she appreciates the attempt. It does get lonely. She had tea with Ada the other day, and she saw her family last week, but that was more so so she could visit the dogs and the rose garden, not… They seem so petty and insignificant now, her parents, her brother. Aunt Tess and Uncle Tony came by after, for drinks. Lydia left then. She doesn’t appreciate Therese’s quiet interrogations as to whether she’s been ‘trying hard enough’ to have a child for Tom. 

Besides, what’s the rush? He’s already got one. 

“My only sibling is seven years older,” she says, “I’m used to being alone.” She wants to ask if she can bring Polly and Art to live with them, but that’s ridiculous. This house may be bigger on the inside than the outside, but it is nowhere near big enough to accommodate two rambunctious greyhounds. In a few years, when they have a larger house out in the countryside, then they can move the dogs in. 

“I just worry,” she says. That too is a lie. She doesn’t worry. About him? What is there to worry about? He’s more impulsive than he seems, can be short-sighted, but she’s never seriously worried about him being in over his head so far. As of right now, the list of people he answers to is very short indeed. It’s just that she would rather be on it. “About you. I wish…” she trails off, adds a demure little sigh. “I know it will take time. For you to trust me. How you should be able to. I’m your wife. You know I will always support you.” She kisses his cheek. “No matter what.”

When he speaks again, his voice is strange, almost gravelly, which isn’t like him at all. His hand on the small of her back tightens, forces her to sit up very straight, like a marionette or a doll on his knee. “Don’t ever lie to me,” he says. “That’s all I want. Do you promise?” Again, like a child. She is starting to grow a little concerned. If he had some run-in with Amy Benson, it obviously did not go according to plan, as she can’t imagine why the woman would seek him out on her own, she obviously had vested interest in keeping his daughter away from him.

She decides to risk it. This is the most emotionally vulnerable she's ever seen him. Sometimes you have to strike while the iron is hot. “I’m not like her,” Lydia breathes, and strokes his scalp, gently, the way she might a dog resting its head in her lap. “You don’t ever have to worry about that. I will never lie to you.” She pauses. “I will never leave you.” His gaze snaps over to her as if on command, dark and unreadable. 

“Good,” he says, and then a little quieter. “Good.” He clears his throat slightly, and she gets the hint and stands up, stepping out of the way so he can stand as well. “We’ll… we’ll talk about the logistics later. But you have nothing to worry about. In… in that regard. This marriage is very important to me.”

She has no idea if he’s talking about him and his old flame or the fact that he’s got a bastard daughter running about, but decides she might as well take him at his word for now. He’s not a fool, he knows he can’t make any public overtures towards the mother or the girl. And Lydia really doesn’t care if he wants to funnel his own money into a trust fund or buy them a house somewhere, she really doesn’t. It would just be a little more reassuring if Amy Benson were not working alongside Albus Dumbledore and an active member of MESP. Far too much overlap there for Lydia’s tastes. Really. Couldn’t he have gotten a cocktail waitress pregnant instead? He had to choose a career woman? She supposes he couldn’t have predicted that trajectory at eighteen, though. He’s not a seer. Thank Merlin. 

She lays a hand on his chest comfortingly. His shirt is rumpled and stained. “Of course I’m not. I know you. You’re loyal, Tom. Dependable,” she adds, giving him a brief, sad smile. 

She makes to go, moves towards the door, yawning, but he catches her hand. Lydia stops, glances back at him. His face is slightly shadowed. “It’s late,” he says, his hand warm in hers. “But I thought we might… well. If you’re still… amenable to it.”

Oh, she thinks, he must be desperate. For anything at all. There’s a brief pang, not of sympathy or disgust, but… she doesn’t know. She feels a bit pitying, she supposes. For herself and for him. 

“Of course,” she says, automatically, as if he’d asked her to start dinner for six. “Yes. I’ll freshen up.”

She wears the white silk slip trimmed with scalloped lace that she wore on their wedding night, does her hair again, applies enough perfume to drown out whatever unfamiliar scents are clinging to him. Reapplies deodorant, runs her hands down her legs to make sure they’re smooth, and waits for him until he is ready, sitting cross-legged on the bed, several strawberry blonde locks artfully slipping over her shoulders, eyelashes dark and fluttering. 

Her appearance in the long mirror in the corner of the room reminds her of a white moth, fluttering inside a darkened lantern. She rises up on her knees to kiss him when he finally approaches, and can taste the blood from his lip bleeding anew on the tip of her tongue. When he moves onto the bed beside her, straddling her, she leans back until the back of her head meets the pillow and lifts her legs to lock them around his waist, teasing while she lazily grips his shoulders with her manicured hands. He pushes up the slip impatiently until it pools around her hips, and his other thumb leaves a hard indent inside her thigh. 

It’s not terrible. Lydia has nothing to judge it by, but he doesn’t know her body half as well as she does, and it’s a bit awkward and uncomfortable to start with, although she will say he does at least put more effort into it than she’d expected. You can learn a lot about someone through sex, she supposes. 

Her aunt didn’t linger much on the art of seduction with her, like a scene from some tawdry romance novel where the young ingenue is ‘educated in the carnal lusts’, Lydia thinks. “When a man is comfortable with you, he becomes easier to control,” Therese had said, more or less, not in those exact words, but something along those lines. Sex within a marriage usually involved intimacy. Intimacy invited honesty, or at least trust. Trust meant power. And power was something to be accumulated.

Lydia doesn’t know if she would call this fumbling first attempt ‘intimate’, exactly, but she also knows it could have been worse. She doesn’t know him, really. She knows he is capable of cruelty the same way everyone she knows is capable of cruelty. Whether that cruelty also extends to the bedroom was simply a floating question, up in the air, unanswered. Now that she knows what he's like, she would not call him cruel in that regard. She would not call him warm, or loving, or generous, either. 

What she would say is that he applies himself to sex the same way he applies himself to everything else, that he is not very open to critique but eager to prove himself, and that whether it is a personal preference or simply what he’s used to, the fact that she was prepared to more or less hike up her nightgown and lie back and think of England was not something that seemed to satisfy him. He like praise, she decides. In this as much as everything else. He likes to be praised, to be wanted, to be desired. He likes to feel safe as much as any man would, she supposes, when in bed with a woman. He doesn’t like to be told what to do, but he’ll do it if you ask nicely. 

She tabulates this information in her mind long after he’s fallen asleep beside her. At this point she is very used to sleeping next to him. He sleeps on his side facing the window, with it cracked open so the night air creeps into the drafty room. His back might as well be a wall between them. She lies on her back, wonders if she’s reading too much into it. One night isn’t exactly a wide range of experience to draw on. It didn’t hurt the way her mother warned her it might, before the wedding. Some hasty, dirty, hushed little conversation variating wildly between horror stories and womanly advice, back from the days when they still got naked around fires and had wild orgies on the summer solstice, Lydia supposes, although she’s fairly certain half of that is invented.

He’s boring when he sleeps, she decides. He’s a very handsome man, make no mistake, but nothing about his looks is terribly eye catching aside from his high cheekbones and frame; he has good shoulders for a man who leans more towards lithe than muscular. The intelligence in his eyes and the elegance of his movements are really the appeal, and that’s not there when he’s unconscious. His beauty is dulled, sheathed again, like a sword back in a scabbard. 

His mouth is a creased line of his worry; he doesn’t like whatever he’s dreaming about. She wonders if he’s dreaming about her. 

He’s in a foul mood for the next week, she’ll give him that, but he’s in _the mood_ nearly every night. She’s not sure if he’s trying to prove something to himself, has some misplaced guilt over neglecting his wife to work through, or has elected that they ought to start trying for a child now that he’s coming up on the anniversary of his inauguration into office. Lydia doesn’t ask; she has another visit to the school to prepare for. Some professor interviews, this time. 

She’s going on a weekday, this time, in the evening, and he’s still at work when she’s readying to Floo into Hogsmeade, but she’s unsurprised by the note he’s left for her on the end table. 

_Lydia-_

_Re: Prof Benson, Dumbledore; do not engage._

Typical. Does he really think she’s so simple, as to go stumbling into Dumbledore’s office and confessing all his secrets over tea and biscuits? She rolls her eyes, and tosses it into the fire, followed by the Floo powder in a puff of green smoke. 

The entire Board of Governors doesn’t make the visit this time; less than half, she should say, the rest have other things to concern themselves with besides what they assume is merely some good PR for the minister’s bored young wife, pretending she’s invested in their children’s education. Lydia winds up being escorted by a sonorous Dippet all the way up to the Divination tower, which is really a turret, one that the wind can be heard lashing at outside, given it’s not well into the middle of November, the days growing darker and shorter and rainier. She’d really rather start with the core subjects, but she’s not surprised they’re stalling for time, trying to get their syllabi and offices in order, by pawning her off on the electives instructors. What’s next, they take her out on a broom with the quidditch coach? Another tour of the library?

Lydia has never in fact met Professor Iris Penvenen before, is only acquainted with the family name, which really everyone knows, and since Rosamund Penvenen is well into her sixties by now, her daughter must be middle aged herself. She expects a somewhat dumpy, scattered woman with a lot of scarves and jangling jewelry, nattering on about tea leaves and horoscopes. What she gets is a peppy blonde in her thirties with startlingly pale eyelashes, painted on brows, and the most outrageously muggle poodle cut that Lydia’s ever seen. 

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Iris Penvenen chirps, sticking out her hand, her nails wine red. Lydia forces a smooth, unthreatened smile. Iris giggles. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gaunt- I couldn’t resist! So high society! God, you must tell me where you got that purse? It’s exquisite- well, thank you, Headmaster, I’ll take good care of her!” And then the door is all but slammed in Dippet’s well-meaning, wrinkled face, and Lydia is alone with a woman whom she is beginning to suspect may be part tiger, the way she prowls around as if they were old friends already.

Her office is warmly lit, full of soft fabrics and overstuffed cushions, lit by sputtering lanterns with intricate metal cut-outs that cast curious shapes across the tapestried walls. Her desk is a cluttered mess, though, full of papers and pens and quills and books in haphazard piles. Iris sweeps some off and into an open squeaky drawer as she sits; Lydia regards the chair before her dubiously; it’s not even a chair but a tasseled ottoman. 

“Sweets?” Iris Penvenen prods a small porcelain bowl towards her. “They’re caramel,” she adds, as if to sweeten the pot. The turquoise of her Mandarin blouse brings out the blue of her eyes; she really is quite a pretty woman, Lydia thinks, even if she’s verging on spinsterhood. The thought of the Penvenen line dying out is the subject of much contempt in pureblood circles. Neither of Rosamund Penvenen’s two daughters have married or produced children who might inherit the gift of prophecy. It will be a bad blow to magical Britain to have lost bragging rights to yet another ill-fated line of seers, even if most prophecies are little more than dandelion fluff on the wind, inconsequential in the modern age. 

The Ministry paid the proper courtesies in 1932 and 1945, when Grindelwald was at the height of his power, but Penvenen predicted nothing that couldn’t have been clearly deduced by anyone with a functioning sense of history and human behavior. Her prophecies were not the daggers up the sleeve the Ministry had hoped for. The Daily Prophet derided her and dragged her name through the mud- what was the point of a seer who couldn’t help you win a war? And her daughter, who is not even a seer herself, holds the title of Professor of Divination. It’s almost darkly comedic. Iris seems utterly oblivious to it, working through a breathless litany of complaints about her last class of the day and how rambunctious they were- two crystal balls shattered, two! She’ll have them in detention until Christmas!

Finally, she works her way around to Lydia, and smiles brightly, revealing small, white teeth. “So how has your day been? Can I ask that? I’m sorry, I’ve never been interrogated before.”

Lydia blinks. Iris chuckles. “Kidding! Oh, the look on your face- oh, don’t worry- of course I’m happy to be here, you know, it’s a welcome break from grading homework by myself after dinner.” She yawns, as if to illustrate her point. 

“My day’s been going quite well so far,” Lydia says, delicately. “It’s been the highlight of my year, these visits to the school- so enriching. And very informative. I had no idea how much bureaucracy and organization went into maintaining a school like this. I can’t imagine how you’ll cope as the class sizes continue to increase.”

“Hm,” Iris is unwrapping a caramel, “yes, well, luckily Divination is never a very popular elective after their third year, so my class sizes are really quite small once the miscreants have dropped out.” She holds the caramel between two fingers, as if to examine it for defects. “But it is a bit of an issue. We have the space for it, of course, but no one wants to have to hire teacher’s assistants or have two versions of the same class going on. Awful bother.” 

“It’s so fortunate that Headmaster Dippet was able to quickly fill the position of Potions Master,” Lydia says innocently, as Iris crunches down on the caramel. The blonde witch blinks, then smiles, chewing. “I can’t imagine the bother that would cause, if you’d been short a professor for a core subject. Professor Benson is the newest staff member, isn’t she, after Professor Finch joined up four years ago?”

Iris swallows, licking her lips. To Lydia’s dismay, she has not even managed to smudge her pink lipstick. “Yes. Sid and I go way back, of course- we were schoolmates. Ahead of Amy, though- I was a seventh year when she was a first year.” She blinks. “I can’t imagine how much older- God, but you are just twenty three? You’re closer in age to my seventh years than me! You could have been one of my students!” 

Lydia flushes bright red, to her embarrassment, momentarily speechless. It’s not like her to be so caught off guard, but it’s just- she does feel very young, sometimes. And foolish. And- and pointless, the accessory she convinced herself she would not become. She feels a sudden almost sharp stab of relief that at least- well, at least the marriage isn’t a farce now, she’s not a child, he doesn’t treat her like a little girl. But for a moment she sees herself through Iris Penvenen’s eyes, a well-dressed young woman who, when it comes down to it, has no real formal education, whose wand is about as useful as her handbag, married to a man who only bothered to consummate the marriage when he’d gotten himself worked up over his ex lover and needed to let off some steam. Well, Iris doesn’t know that last bit, but-

“Oh,” Iris says, her voice a bit softer, more sympathetic- “Oh, dear, I didn’t mean to- you should be very proud of yourself, Mrs. Gaunt. Really. Most girls in your position would be content to sit at home and and peruse the papers while they’re waited on hand and foot. You’re trying to broaden your horizons. Make a difference. I think that’s very admirable. As much as I disagree with your husband’s policies.”

No one has ever admitted to not supporting Tom’s policies to Lydia’s face before. Her lips part slightly in surprise, but no sound comes out.

“Which ones?” she finally asks, trying to sound mature, in control, sophisticated- she is sophisticated, she’s a Rosier, she’s been abroad, she’s well-read, she’s charming and witty and funny, everyone says so, what does she care what the daughter of some washed up fortune teller thinks of her? Or of Tom, or of his government? They’re winning. They’re succeeding. They are making the future. 

“Well, the one most likely to go through,” Iris says. “Now, don’t get me wrong- the Statute is unwieldy, certainly, it’s a black and white ruling for a very grey world. But I really can’t condone the loosening of the protections against muggles. And it seems rather contradictory, doesn’t it, for the same bill to be bound up in language about closer supervision of muggleborn children?”

Lydia exhales. “It will ensure that innocent people aren’t being imprisoned for taking a stand against muggle ills. Protecting muggles from themselves, even. It’s absurd that we have people in prison for using magic during the war with Hitler, or for protecting their neighbors from falling bombs.”

“Yes,” says Iris, “that’s dreadful, but… it’s what it doesn’t say, you know? If ‘magic only in life or death instances’ is… broadened so widely, well, isn’t that carte blanche for some very disreputable people to run wild, then claim they were acting in self defense? After all, who are our courts more likely to believe? The muggle or the witch?”

“There will be amendments over time,” Lydia replies. “What’s more important is to have it in the books, to set precedent. And the children- shouldn’t muggleborn children be protected? Even from their own families? If they aren’t capable of raising a young witch or wizard with care, they shouldn’t have the right to.”

“But it holds muggle parents of magical children to a radically different standard than magical parents.”

“Of course it’s a different standard,” Lydia says patiently. “We’re different sorts of people. We live in two different worlds, with two different cultures.” She thinks for a moment, then with a feeling of triumph-, “Surely you can relate to that, a desire to reduce neglect. After all, you and your sister were raised primarily by your aunt, weren’t you? As your mother was… indisposed?”

Iris’ open, inquisitive face shutters in an instant. The temperate in the room drops by several degrees, it seems to Lydia. The caramel wrapper crinkles between Iris’ fingers as a clock chimes somewhere. “Well,” she says, “I think that’s all the time we have for today. The work of a teacher is never done, you know. Shall I see you out, Mrs. Gaunt?”

Lydia stands gracefully, simmering with victory on the inside like a pot poised to boil over, thrilled to have finally gotten one over on her. “Do give your best to your family,” she says, airily, as Iris escorts her to the door. “I know this must be a difficult time of year for them, what with everyone waiting to hear what the future holds.”

“I will,” Iris says, coldly. “In fact, you’ll be among the first to know. We always send word to the Minister’s office first. Wouldn’t want to catch them with their trousers down.”

Lydia blanches at her crude comment, but then she’s on the narrow winding stairwell again, the door shut behind her, leaving her in the dark. 

She wanders down an empty corridor, a bit peeved, until Castor Mulciber rounds a corner and sees her, quickly moving to her side, his dark umber robes whispering across the floor. “Well, how was it, then talking with the crackpot’s daughter?”

“Unenlightening,” Lydia says, with a sharp little smile. “It seems to be a family trait.” 

He chuckles; he has the same sort of laugh as his nephew Virgil, old Castor, and while he’s more or less a harmless old man, Mulciber the Younger is not, and that does send a little twitch down her spine. 

“Good news, though,” he says. “June Carmody just caught me in the owlery, she got advance word from her husband. The vote’s gone through. The Statute bill’s passed.”

Lydia stops walking, stunned for a moment. “Really?” She was sure it’d be another month of debates.

“It was close, and Tuft nearly saw it defeated twice, but yes. It’s gone through. Tom must be thrilled.”

“Yes,” Lydia says, blinking, “yes, of course, this is- well, he wanted some significant legislation done his first year in office, this is wonderful news. It’s just what he needs. He’s been feeling a bit poorly, lately.”

Mulciber gives her another grandfatherly smile, offering her his arm. “Well, maybe he’ll be home early tonight. The two of you are young; you shouldn’t waste this time together. Go out to dinner. Or have a weekend away. Merlin, the things Beatrice and I used to get up when we were your age and newlyweds-,”

He cuts himself as they near the stairwell, which is considerably busier than the corridor itself; Lydia supposes curfew must be approaching; a crowd of fourth years dart past them, snickering to one another and casting wary looks at the strange adults on their territory. Two prefects walk briskly behind them, looking rather fed-up; Lydia recognizes one as the Prince girl. Merlin, what has she done with herself?

There’s some kind of grease or pomade in her dark hair, which is piled atop her head in an unruly mop, a crude imitation of a Victorian bouffant, her blazer is in disarray, and she’s stomping around in brogues. Lydia watches her stalk by with Mulciber, then exchanges a bemused look as they step onto the stairs. 

“I pity Edgar,” he says. “They say raising girls is hell.”

Lydia smiles tightly. “Some girls, I suppose.”

The antechamber outside the Great Hall is full of students departing after a late dinner; Lydia scans the room, then spots a familiar figure in a corner, speaking with her arms folded under her chest to a few first years, nodding sympathetically. Amy Benson looks exhausted; her hair is pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail, she’s not wearing any makeup, and even her clothes look a little more worn and rumpled than usual. She glances up as if alerted by some invisible signal, spots Mulciber in his very traditional robes and Lydia in her fur coat and heels, and stiffens, barely restraining a scowl.

Lydia meets her gaze coolly, then waves. The first years look around, startled, spot Lydia, and start to giggle and gasp, lips moving- _do you know her, Professor? Isn’t that the Minister’s wife?_

Amy nods shortly, then turns so her body is angled away, blocking the children’s view of Lydia and Mulciber, and carries on as if nothing had happened.

There is no competition, Lydia reminds herself sharply. She is a distraction. A nuisance. He will work it out for himself. And if he doesn’t, you will remind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. It's always awkward for me to switch back to a different POV after a Tom and Amy chapter, just because they are the people who flow the easiest for me. But ultimately I'm satisfied with Lydia's narration for this chapter. She's become increasingly disillusioned over the last six months of marriage, both with Tom, herself, and her expectations for her life. While she's no longer under her family's thumb, she's not exactly free to do just what she pleases, either, and she has to be always on guard in an effort to protect both Tom's political image and her own reputation.
> 
> 2\. It feels incredibly weird to go from Tom and Amy having a very... passionate... fight to Tom and Lydia having ultimately loveless sex, but I didn't think it was so out of bounds that Tom, reeling from his fight with Amy, might try to comfort himself by seeking affection through Lydia, who he knows doesn't love him but who he at least feels is loyal to him, as she has no one else. As Lydia notes, he seems to be someone who craves praise and adoration even during very intimate moments. Tom then keeps this up by consistently seeking sex with Lydia. While it does give her a mild confidence boost in that she no longer feels as though he's infantilizing her (at least not physically), Lydia has no delusions that his newfound interest in sex with her is the result of him suddenly beginning to fall in love with her. Really, Lydia doesn't seem to think anyone *could* love her beyond aesthetic admiration, which I think says a lot about her childhood.
> 
> 3\. I wanted Lydia and Iris to get the chance to talk to do some obvious foreshadowing of the prophecy that Iris' mother Rosamund is set to deliver, as Sidney mentioned a while back, and for Lydia to sort of 'meet her match' in terms of passive aggressive but cheery comments haha. Iris knows how to play on Lydia's insecurities over her youth, lack of education, and anxiety over her and Tom's image. Lydia does not like being reminded of any of this, and in retaliation tries to throw back gossip over Iris' mother and childhood back in her face- ignoring the similarities between them, as they were both raised by their aunts. 
> 
> 4\. One of Tom's big policy goals has gone through- the Statute of Secrecy, which prohibits displaying magic (or using magic on) muggles except in cases of life or death, has been 'loosened' in some aspects, so now wizards and witches are free to intervene using magic if they feel there is a 'reasonable expectation of harm'. Iris criticizes this by saying that it can be easily used to cover up various crimes against muggles by giving wizards an automatic excuse. The law also contains language referring to a 'need' to closely supervise muggleborn children- basically like assigning them all an automatic caseworker to monitor their muggle parents and households, and remove them from their families if it's deemed necessary. While Lydia defends it by pointing out that muggleborn children are often abused or ostracized by family members who are frightened of their magic, Iris points out that it is also ripe for abuse by giving the Ministry an easy way to take these children from their families and raise them in the magical world entirely.
> 
> 5\. While Lydia repeatedly downplays the potential threat that Amy (and Mae's) existence pose to her, now that she has it actually confirmed that Tom is still hung up on Amy and has an illegitimate daughter running around, she is beginning to grow more internally wary and paranoid, even, of the possible ramifications of this. While she doesn't think Tom would ever risk publicly acknowledging any of this, Lydia is uncomfortable with the fact that Amy is working alongside some powerful people and has influence as a Hogwarts professor and member of MESP. As she mentions, she'd be much more comfortable if Amy didn't have that a career at all or was pretty much connection-less. I imagine it's also weird for her to think that she is only about 9 years older than her husband's daughter. 
> 
> 6\. Not actually sure yet who will be narrating next chapter, since I am editing the (loose) outline for this fic, but as always you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	32. Mae XIV - Arthur I

HOGWARTS, DECEMBER 1958

Mae shows up to the last Dueling Club meeting of the autumn term early, not because of a sudden commitment to timeliness- she narrowly evaded detention two days prior when she showed up seven minutes late to Charms- but because the Slytherins always show up early since their Head of House is running the club, and she knows for a fact half of the boys have crushes on Professor Carmody, "filthy halfblood" or not, who is Mae thinks, not beautiful, that’s not the right word for her scarred face and shaggy auburn hair, but striking in a slightly wild way, like an actress playing the vamp in a noir film, where her cool green eyes say more than her mouth ever does. Right now she looks more tired than usual, much like Mum; there are dark circles under her eyes, not quite hidden by her foundation.

And Mae wants to talk to Ambrose, preferably in private, because she feels sick to her stomach. The Sunday after Mum was supposed to go visit Matthew Abbott in the hospital, she called Mae into her office instead, locked the door, and told her very seriously that Minister Gaunt knew she was his daughter and that Mae was not to go anywhere, during the winter break, without telling Mum exactly where she was going, who she was going with, and when she’d be back. She’d looked like she expected Mae to put up more a fight about it, but Mae had just nodded and agreed, and wondered what had happened to Mum’s corduroy jacket, usually hanging from the back of her chair. She'd wanted to ask how Mum knew that, but when she opened her mouth nothing had really come out. Mae had been angry with herself afterwards, but now she can admit, that after hearing so much she never wanted to hear, she was afraid to pry any deeper. 

That's a new feeling for her, being afraid. Not that she's never been scared before, but that was always of concrete things, things right in front of her, that she could see and touch. This is a different sort of fear, more like numbing dread, not panicked terror.

Luckily, Ambrose is not fawning over Carmody, who is trying to extricate herself from conversation with two sixth years who don’t see anything wrong with using fire spells during duels, much to her consternation. Instead Ambrose is sitting on a bench under one of the high windows with a bunch of what Valerie calls the trad waltzers, because they’re all from the very old families and don’t know what jazz or rock and roll are, but if they did, they’d probably find a way to make it about how much money their families have got and how their nice their clothes are. And if they ever wandered into a muggle dance hall, they wouldn't know what to do with themselves without a string orchestra, never mind a brass band, or Merlin forbid, jazz. 

By now Mae knows most of their names through sheer osmosis; there’s Ambrose Bulstrode, of course, and Walter Avery, and Benji Flint and Stephen Travers and Elias Fawley. Stephen Travers gives the most put-upon, exaggerated sigh when he sees her coming over, because he thinks she’s a freak after he caught her catching rats for Night-Without-Stars in the dungeons. Only Mae couldn’t tell him that’s why she had a dead rat in her hands, so she said her cat killed it, but Sal wasn’t around and she doesn’t think it was a very convincing lie. She’d hoped he’d be too scared to go around saying anything, but now he makes little squeaking noises under his breath whenever they’re in the same vicinity. Thankfully they only have History of Magic together.

Ambrose looks horrified to see her, since they’re not really supposed to acknowledge one another when his Slytherin friends are around in case they rat him out to Mummy and Daddy who will throw a fit that he’s being tutored in Transfiguration by a filthy little mudblood. It almost makes Mae want to blow his cover, every once in a while, but at this point she can appreciate wanting to hide some things from your parents, even if they're in the wrong. 

But it can’t be helped; he’s a loose end and she’s got to set him straight, because if she’s right and he said something to someone- like maybe his stupid cousin who’s married to her father, for starters. Mae doesn't know how to feel about Lydia Rosier. She's not even old enough to be Mae's mother. Not that Mae would want her to be. And she looks nothing like Mum. What if she and Gaunt have a baby together? That would be horrible. Mae tries to envision a half-sibling she'd likely never meet. Ambrose would know them better than her! It's like something out of a film. 

Because Mae doesn’t know how else Gaunt would find out, unless someone else knows something or Mum cracked and told him- she doesn’t think Mum saw Abbott this weekend at all, but someone else entirely, and Mae wishes she’d been there so she could- she doesn’t know what. Yell at him? Hex him? She feels a flare of fury. It’s their life. He’s got no right to interfere. And under the flare of fury, a pang of something terrible and pitiful; why didn’t he come talk to me? He could write. If he can come to Mum he can come to me. 

He doesn’t want you, she tells herself coldly, and maintains that cold expression with Ambrose and his friends. 

“Sorry, Benson,” Stephen Travers says, curling his lip to reveal far too much of his gums, “we’re not looking to buy any rat skulls. Or was it their tails you wanted? Does your mum need those for her potions?”

Walter Avery snickers, while Elias Fawley and Benji Flint just look confused. Mae gives him a dismissive little look, one hand on her hip. “Bulstrode,” she says, arching an eyebrow at Ambrose. “Come over here for a minute. Professor Dumbledore caught me in the hall and wants me to tell you something, since you missed class yesterday.” It’s true; Ambrose cuts Transfiguration as often as possible, which is to say he’s done it thrice this term, the maximum one can before Dumbledore decides to dump non-voluntary makeup work on your head.

Walter continues to snicker, ignoring Ambrose’s glare. 

“Oooh,” Benji Flint says under his breath, “did you bomb another test, Brosie?”

Ambrose punches him in the arm, hard. 

“I haven’t got all day,” Mae snaps, examining her nails. There is a little blood under them from when she tried to climb up a wall this morning to get the tennis ball Malcolm had thrown over it. 

Ambrose reluctantly follows her to the opposite corner of the room, looking nervous. “Did Dumbledore really tell you my test score?”

“Of course not,” Mae hisses, resisting the urge to grab him by the collar and give him a shake. “I was lying. Obviously.”

“Oh, you’re getting better at it,” he compliments her.

Now she does roll her eyes. “Listen. I need to- I just wanted to tell you-,” she bites her lip, and lowers her voice to a whisper, even though there’s no one else within earshot, and Carmody is still distracted. “Don’t tell anyone about me… being a parselmouth, alright? I don’t want everyone gossiping about it.”

Ambrose flushes as ruddy as his hair. “I haven’t, I swear.” Filthy liar. She can see it in his eyes; they’re wide as saucers with guilt, and he looks like he wants to sink into the floor. 

“I’m serious,” she says through gritted teeth, although the temptation to hex him is very strong. “I don’t want- I don’t want people treating me different for it. Or saying stupid things about me being related to Salazar Slytherin. We’re not all so obsessed with our house’s founder that we’ve got his name stitched on our socks, alright?”

“Salazar’s name is not on my socks,” he reddens even further. 

“You know what I mean. I get that it’s neato to you, but not to me, okay? Promise you won’t tell anyone. Ever.”

“I promise,” he says, avoiding eye contact. 

Mae huffs, unconvinced. She’d make him do an Unbreakable Vow but she’s not sure how that works yet. “And if I ever hear about it, I’m going to leave a dead rat in your pillowcase. Got it?”

He looks disgusted, then leery. “You don’t even know our password.”

“I have my ways,” she threatens, then, seeing that his friends are starting to work their way up to catcalls and whistles, steps away, arms crossed. Ambrose retreats back to the small group of Slytherins, shoving at Elias when he says something to him, gesturing at Mae on the other side of the room. 

Carmody begins her instruction shortly after that, although not before snapping at Christine for rushing in late- “Really, Miss Applewhite, do I need to buy you a new watch?” which sends Christine, who was born to be a teacher’s pet, Mae thinks, into a tearful spiral that even makes Mae feel a bit sorry for her. Carmody looks a little repentant later, and compliments Christine on her form when she successfully jinxes Mae, causing her to nearly drop her wand. 

Mae doesn’t do very well; she’s too distracted with thoughts of Mum and Gaunt and- it is her fault, maybe, she thinks, unable to ignore the churning in her gut. If he found out because she messed up and spoke Parseltongue in front of Ambrose, and he mentioned it to Lydia Rosier- who else might she have told? What if the rumor is already making its rounds through pureblood society? What if it comes out? She feels stupid, because some part of her- some part of her wants it all out in the open, the truth, but she’s acting like a baby. Of course it can’t come out. Mum would be humiliated, everyone would be talking about it and wanting to ask stupid questions, and her father-

Her father, it sounds so strange, he’s not her father, not really, if he was never there-

She doesn’t know what he would do. Nothing good, probably. It’s like- it’s like when you put your fingers near a light socket, knowing you might get a shock, but sort of wanting it all the same. It’s hard to stop thinking about it. Mum’s not lying to her anymore. He’s not a good person. They can’t ever be a family and they don’t need him, anyways, she’s always been happy with just Mum and her, the two of them together against the world. It’s just- it’s like she picked this random scab off and now it won’t stop bleeding. It didn’t hurt before she knew. Now it does. But she’s got no one to blame for that but herself. She was the one who wouldn’t stop digging and poking around. Well, she got what she came for. 

Carmody ends the session early, instructs them all to have a happy Yule or Christmas or whatever they’re celebrating, and sends them on their way.

This time Mae does walk down with the others to the train station to see them off, mostly because she intends to go shopping in Hogsmeade afterwards- no one can stop her, the term’s officially over and the only one with any say over what she does is Mum- and yes, she did ask Mum beforehand, only she lied and said it was because she needed to pick up cat food for Salome, but at least this time she lied for a good, innocent cause!

Christine is excited because her dad has the week before Christmas off for once, and for once Mae can’t bring herself to rain on Christine’s smarmy parade. Part of her, she knows, is jealous. For all that Christine’s dad sounds like an overbearing pig, she does really seem to love him, and she always wants to brag about him and his accomplishments. What would Mae say about her own? He’s the Minister, but he’s actually really corrupt and evil, and Mum probably worries I’ll turn out just like him.

Marian hugs her, to her surprise, before she boards the train, and tells her not to freeze up here in the highlands while the rest of them are escaping to the south- well, besides Malcolm, who’s going down to London only to have to take a muggle train right back up into Scotland, the poor sod. He’s too busy arguing with his sister over whose luggage is whose to complain, though. Valerie throws a snowball at her before scampering onto the train, forcing Mae to prowl up and down the length of the platform until Valerie’s dark auburn head pokes out from a window, so she can get her back with one, right in the nose. 

“BENSON!” A prefect shouts from another window. “That’ll be ten points from Ravenclaw when term starts up again!” So Mae throws one at her, too, although it misses because the Hogwarts Express has already started to move, steam billowing in the frigid mountain air. Mae watches it disappear down the tracks, a bloody red smear growing more and more obscured by billowing white, then turns and begins the hike back uphill into the village, her hands in her coat pockets.

Hogsmeade isn’t known for its plethora of gift shops or tourist traps, as they get relatively few tourists, even during the holidays, but Mae knows by now where to go if she wants to find something in the least worthwhile to get Mum for Christmas. Gladrags is mostly thrifted clothes, but there’s also a decent supply of antiques and jewelry, and while Mae hasn’t got much money, she’s prepared to haggle- Mum taught her well. Besides, she does think she’s managed to win over most of the old coots around here, since children are very rare to see in Hogsmeade once the train’s left the station. The door chimes as she enters, and the grey-haired witch behind the counter nods to her without looking up from her copy of Witch Weekly.

Mae disappears down the aisles towards the back, avoiding the teeming racks of robes, hats, scarves and dresses, almost banging into an overflowing barrel full of parasols and umbrellas. She picks up a pair of silver nylon house slippers, then sets them back down; Mum would think they’re too flimsy for regular wear, and only ever put them on at Christmas. Mae wants to get her something she’ll really like, not a one-off gift. She feels a small lump in her throat. She’s going to try to be a better daughter for her new year’s resolution she decides, with another guilty lurch. She hasn’t exactly done a bang-up job at it these past two years.

A crystalline bottle of perfume is also rejected; it’s far too expensive and Mum prefers muggle perfumes to magical ones, says the enchanted ones are overpowering and are more like to give everyone around you a headache. So is a beaded purse with fake pearls; it looks cheap, and Mum may dress with a modest budget, but she never dresses cheap. There’s a rhinestone bracelet watch, but that looks like something a teenage girl would wear on her first date. A brass cigarette holder; she didn’t know witches smoked cigarettes. A matching brush and comb set; that looks like something Aunt Ruby would buy Mae. 

Mae bites her lip, and moving over to the next shelf. Muffles and mittens. Paisley scarves. Neckties and cuff links. Pins and brooches. Belts. She pauses when she gets to the wallets; they’re clearly intended for men to carry, not women, but one is genuine wyvern scales, cheaper than dragonhide but still gleaming bright and iridescent in the dim lighting of the shop. Mae snatches one up, inspecting it closer, turning it over in her mittened palm, smiling at the way it shimmers and shines. There’s even a pocket for keys and a little window for cards. 

“Looks like a good choice,” a voice says behind her, and Mae all but jumps out of her skin before turning quickly to see Arthur Norbrook. He smiles at her, wiping off his fogged up glasses with his gloves. Mae doesn’t care if he’s a Knight of Walpurgis or not. He’s not going to do anything bad to her in Gladrags in the middle of the afternoon and she’s not going to be intimidated by some pathetic old man in specs. 

Alright, he’s not that old, not really, but her point remains.

“It’s a gift,” Mae says, holding the wallet to her chest almost protectively. She doesn’t want him to even look at it. 

“Last minute Christmas shopping?” he chuckles; if he notices how tense she is, he ignores it. He plucks up the bottle of perfume from the shelf, rolling it around in his hand. “We’re on the same page, then- I always leave these sorts of things far too late. My family wasn’t very involved in the holiday spirit, growing up, but my wife loves it.”

Professor Carmody is about the last person Mae would have predicted to have a love of Christmas, but she holds her tongue. “Are you getting her that perfume?” she asks instead. “Professor Carmody?”

He smiles slightly, then picks up the house slippers with the other hand, weighing them in front of her like a magician before he does a trick. “What do you think? Which is better?”

“Professor Carmody wears house slippers?” she asks dubiously, and he barks a proper, loud laugh; it almost makes her jump. 

“I’ll have to tell her she’s got quite the severe reputation among her students. The perfume, then?”

Mae is cross with his bemusement; can he make it anymore obvious that he just thinks she’s a silly little girl who has no idea who she’s dealing with? “Get her both,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Unless you haven’t got the money for it. Mister,” she tacks on at the end, because she is almost being rude, and he’s still a grownup who might get very peeved with her for being ‘disrespectful’ of him, even if he’s not her bloody professor, just an annoying neighbor.

“I think I will,” he says. “You’re right. It’s not the season for stinginess.” Norbrook tucks the slippers under his arm, grips the perfume bottle more firmly, and smiles at her in his usual amiable way. “Thank you very much for your help.”

“You’re welcome,” she says haughtily, drawing herself up to her full height, and stands her ground until he walks over to the register to pay. Then she looks down again at the wallet in her hand. Mum won’t have to bring a handbag to class with her anymore if she has this. It’s practical, she tells herself. She’s not just buying it because it looks pretty. Making up her mind, she waits impatiently for Norbrook to leave, the door chiming noisily behind him, and then marches over to the shopkeeper, ready for a haggle.

HOGSMEADE, DECEMBER 1958

Arthur is careful to stomp off his boots on the mat before he even takes them off; June is a stickler for clean floors. Well, she’s a stickler for cleanliness in general, but she’s very particular about floors, because she grew up mopping the floors of her family’s pub after hours. He takes off his hat and coat, and hides his gift bags in the hall closet, and follows the smell of something simmering into the kitchen. It smells like mutton and carrots, most strongly. He inspects the pot for a moment, and is debating trying a taste, despite knowing June will have his head if she finds him anywhere near her cooking, until a noise from behind startles him.

June sits at the aged kitchen table, her papers spread out before her, but the noise was not the scratch of her fountain pen or the rustle of her papers but something clinking in a cup. She glances up at him briefly, and her eyes want to smile, he can tell, but her mouth is a firm, straight line, and there are high spots of color in her pale cheeks. He means to tell her that he just ran into the little Benson girl, but- 

“Come look at this,” she says, shoving the cup at him. He wonders for a moment if she’s caught a bug of some sort in it. He went through a insect collecting phase as a child that lasted for several years; even entertained thoughts of becoming a magizoologist with a concentration in butterflies or moths. But that wouldn’t have been very practical, and when it came time to decide on his NEWT level courses, common sense won out. 

Arthur doesn’t love his job; doesn’t even like it, somedays, but he does know what to expect by now, and even if the work can be dreadfully dull or very, very stressful, at least it pays well. June is well compensated as a professor, but before she joined the staff at Hogwarts they’d been primarily living off his income. By thirty, her professional dueling days had been largely behind her; it wasn’t so different from most sports in that sense. And the reward money for a victorious match was often vastly overstated, once you took into account taxes, travel and healing costs, and all the fees to participate in any given league or fighting circuit. 

He draws up a chair, squeezing her hand as he does so; she flinches at how cold his fingers are, but it doesn’t elicit the teasing glare he’d expected. The cup doesn’t hold anything living, just a strip of burned ribbon and the stub of a melted blue candle; he lifts it up with his thumb and forefinger, curious. The ribbon is unusual; it has an almost unnatural pearlescent sheen to it; he turns it over, then frowns at the tiny logo stamped on the back; a full moon with an L in it.

“Lucina brand,” June says, her voice strangely hoarse, as if she’s suddenly developed a cold. “Top of the line, as far as tests go.”

Arthur drops the singed ribbon back into the cup. He’s seen adverts for the brand before, in some of the magazines June gets, or in various waiting rooms. They sell things for midwifery and pregnancy; the company is named after the Roman goddess of childbirth. His tongue is thick in his mouth all at once, as if he’d just bitten down hard on it. “You-,”

“You can order them quite covertly in the mail,” June says, speaking in a forcibly clipped, cold manner. “Same day delivery. Only six sickles per kit. You light the candle, piss on the ribbon, burn it. If the smell makes you sick to your stomach, you’re in for a rude awakening.” 

“That’s an old wives’ tale,” he says, when he regains his power of speech. “That- that can’t be accurate-,”

She taps the ribbon with a manicured finger. “Au contraire. Charmed ribbon. Charmed candle. Not so charmed life,” she looks like she wants to laugh for a moment, but then her shoulders slump slightly. 

He takes her hand again, mindless of the cold of his fingers leeching warmth from hers. “June.”

“I’ll have to make an appointment,” she says, “But I should guess six weeks or so. I feel like I did the last time, more or less.”

“It could still be a mistake,” he says. “You might just have a bad reaction to the candle scent.”

“Well, then an appointment with a midwife will clear that right up,” she still won’t quite look at him. 

He glances down and blanches. “Are you marking tests right now?”

“I can’t very well sit around moping, can I?” she snaps back, tearing her hand from his, and then sniffs. Up close, he sees the red-rim to her eyes and her slightly smudged makeup. 

Arthur exhales, then pulls her close, one hand on the back of her head, buried in her hair. She resists for a moment, pulling away, the sinks into the embrace. 

“I knew things were going too smoothly,” she mutters to him.

“Don’t say that,” he says. “It will be fine, it- June, you’re thirty five years old. It’s hardly the end of the world-,”

“Well, it’s a bit perilously close to it!” She wrenches her head away, stares at him, blinking hard. “What do you propose? We wait this one out? Just see how it plays? Right, because I’m going to be much help to the cause when I’m six months pregnant, Art!”

“We’re married,” he says, “no one is going to think twice- we can use this. No. It’s a good cover-,”

“Right, because Dumbledore would never suspect the indisposed pregnant woman,” she rolls her eyes. “And Gaunt- do you think he’ll be pleased to hear about it? He’ll wring your neck for taking me out of commission. Applewhite- he’ll have plenty to celebrate, though! He likes them pregnant and barefoot, and now I’m halfway there!”

Arthur doesn’t know whether to laugh or snap back at her. He tries to pull on calmness like a cloak, instead. He’s always been good at that, keeping a level head, even when provoked, never been pushed into doing anything he didn’t already mean to do. He’s let himself be labeled a coward, a bumbling fool, a traitor- anything but hasty, though. No one ever got what they wanted by refusing to wait. And he’s never made a mistake, either. Mistakes are for children. 

“No one is going to wring my neck,” he says. “We can keep it to ourselves until you’re in your last trimester, and then it’s just a few months away from the action. Gaunt will understand. If anything, he might be pleased.”

“Right,” she scoffs, “the first legacy member of the Knights! Maybe Nott can host the baby shower,” She pushes up from the table bitterly; Arthur rises with her, a hand on her elbow as if to steady her. 

June jerks away, scowling. “I’m not an invalid yet.”

He has a brief flash to finding her lying in a crumpled fetal position in the street, under a flickering light, the left side of her face bathed in blood, gravel in her hair. It makes him sick. “You don’t have to be at all, if that’s not what you want. If- if this isn’t what you want.” He pauses, bites back the rage somewhere deep within, not at her but at the circumstances. 

Why did it have to happen like this? A gift dangled over the edge of a cliff. “June,” he says, taking her hand again. This time she doesn’t rip away from him, but turns back, wiping at her nose. “I made my peace with us- with us never having children a long time ago. That’s not… it’s not what I need. Just you. So if you… if you decide that you don’t want this, and not just because- of what the reactions might be, or if you think it will interfere with your work-,”

She sighs, gives a pained sort of smile, and squeezes his fingers. “I don’t know what I want. I won’t until… until we know for sure, I suppose. But I-,” she exhales, and massages her bangs away from her forehead with her free hand. “I don’t know. God. I hate that. Not knowing. The rational part of me- most of me,” she says, at the look on his face, “is screaming that this is not worth it. The risks. If it… we said we were going to see it through, until the end.”

Again, he feels sick, but it is more the heady rush at the top of a slide, not entirely dreadful. “Until the end.” He thinks for a moment of a child with her green eyes and his brown hair, held against his chest. A child that was nothing, did not exist to him until a few minutes ago. How could he want it so much already? It’s selfish of him. Greedy. He has most everything he’s always wanted. He has a good career and he has something to fight for and he has June. What else could he need? But it’s not always about need. 

“We’re making things better,” he says, slowly. “The world, better. For what else but the next generation? What is the point of any of this, if it- if it doesn’t last?”

She looks at him steadily for a moment, then gives a slight nod. “It will last,” June says, clearly, her throat bobbing as she swallows hard. “We will make it last. I’ve waited too long, otherwise.”

Arthur would be content to spend the rest of his life waiting for just about anything, with June, but instead he says, “I love you. More and more every day.”

“You’ve been saying that since we were sixteen,” she rolls her eyes.

He allows himself a quiet chuckle and pulls her closer, wrapping his arms around her. He’s only an inch or two taller than her; their bodies slot well together, like they were made for one another. That’s always what he’s privately thought, logical Ravenclaw or not. That some things are just meant to be, some forces drawn together, and that he and June have always been two of them. They rock together for a brief moment to some unheard tune, and then she pulls away. 

“I need to check on the stew.”

He lets her go, rolling his shoulders back with a groan. “Is it almost done?”

“You’re such a little boy,” she calls over her shoulder, but he can hear the smile in her voice, from the way her words roll together pleasantly. “Almost. Can you stand to wait just a little while longer?”

“I’ll try,” he sits back down, examining the ribbon again. It doesn’t smell like anything but candle wax to him. 

The hazy, pleasant feeling doesn’t last long. She turns back from the pot on the stove; Arthur puts his elbows up on the table, sighing. Four years ago, this would have been everything to him; he would have been overcome with delight and excitement. Now he feels like he just got walloped in the gut with a beater’s bat. He’ll have to return that perfume, he thinks. Aren’t pregnant woman not supposed to put strong fragrances on their skin? June is wearing an oversized jumper and a pair of old blue jeans and her clunky house slippers; she looks nothing like the polished woman who stalks up in her high heels to teach every morning. 

She leans against the counter; they regard one another silently. Arthur has always enjoyed sitting in silence with her. They’ve never had to speak very much to understand one another.

“Your sister’s owl dropped off a note while you were gone,” she finally says, breaking the silence. “She wants us for Christmas.”

Arthur smiles thinly. “That’s no surprise.”

“I know you can’t stand the latest beau, but try not to be such a condescending prick this year, yeah?” She rests her chin on her fist. “I thought he was going to throw something at you when we went over for her birthday.”

“Well,” Arthur says, “if she’d stop trying to drive me into an early grave with this endless parade of muggles, that would be great. Really.”

June snorts, then sits back down at the table with, lolling her head back in the chair, blinking heavily. “Are you going into work tomorrow?”

“Of course I am. You think they’d get anything done in that office without me? It’s been a fucking mess since Gaunt moved up. And now Pike’s starting to get on my case about this refiling system he’s proposing. He wants a record of every time Improper Use and Law Enforcement have overlapped in an investigation.”

June whistles under her breath. “That doesn’t sound good.” 

“It isn’t. Gaunt can’t force him out, either, he’s too popular. He needs to get him on-side. Fast. Or I’ll be spending the spring ‘losing’ files left and right.”

“Be careful,” she warns. “Tom will throw you under if he has to. He might bring you back up later, he might not. You know how he feels about dead weight.”

Arthur snorts. “Thanks, darling.” He does not really mind it, though. June’s brutal honesty is what drew him to her in the first place. She alway said things as she saw them, she never made any excuses, never apologized unless she truly felt she was in the wrong, never expected anything less than greatness from him and herself. He likes that sense of uncompromising ambition. She made him sharper, better. And he stayed her temper, more than once. 

She takes his hand in her own, once again, and raises his knuckles to her mouth, before kissing them, her lips brushing over the cold metal of his wedding ring. “You’ll get through it. We both will. We’ve come too far to turn back now.” 

He smiles, almost sadly, and brushes his fingers across her cheek with his hand in hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Ugh, I don't really like this chapter but I don't hate this chapter either. The next one will be much longer and will cover some exciting Christmas events, such as a staff holiday party and a prophecy. It will likely be divided between multiple POVs because a lot of stuff is happening at roughly the same time.
> 
> 2\. It has belatedly occurred to Mae that Ambrose knowing she is a parselmouth, and him being the cousin of her father's wife, has the potential to be a big problem. How she goes about trying to resolve this problem... is probably not the best method, but she gets points for trying, I suppose.
> 
> 3\. I know Arthur Norbrook is a weird and random POV, but I needed to include this scene and I did not want to be in June's head just yet. If he came across as pretty bland, I did my job, because compared to most of our very... passionate POVs, he is a pretty composed and neutral sort of person, who very rarely gives into any particularly strong emotions. He has this sort of methodical, ticking along mindset that allows him to keep his head down and just keep doing what he's meant to do, even if everyone else is freaking out. It also makes him very reliable, which Tom likes.
> 
> 4\. Home pregnancy tests weren't invented until 1969, and didn't become widespread and available for sale to most people until the 1970s. The 'magical pregnancy test' June uses is based off a historical test doctors would sometimes use on pregnant women in the 17th century, which involving pee on a ribbon, burning the ribbon, and seeing how they reacted to the smell. Obviously not very scientifically accurate, but in the case of the magical version, pretty reliable.
> 
> 5\. This probably feels very out-of-the-blue but I promise June's unexpected pregnancy (we can see from Arthur's POV that they had apparently given up hope of having children some time ago, although June references being pregnant once before, since the symptoms are familiar to her) will actually play a part in the overall plot of the story.
> 
> 6\. You can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	33. Amy XIV

PENZANCE, DECEMBER 1958

Amy winces as the crowded Knight Bus rounds a particularly sharp corner, throwing her into Mae, who jostles against the window and swears under her breath, attracting the ire of the older woman standing in front of them. Amy mouths an apology for the cursing on New Year’s Eve, and gives Mae a warning look. Mae rolls her eyes, arms folded across the deep blue of her velveteen vest; her tapered trousers match it perfectly. Amy thinks she looks like a small Victorian gentleman, but Mae just seems pleased she’s not wearing a dress. Amy will never understand; what Mae likes and doesn’t like in fashion seem to change on a weekly basis now that she’s twelve-going-on-thirteen, as she likes to remind everyone. 

But in general, Amy has gotten the gist that skirts are tolerable because they are a two piece, dresses less so. Sometimes she tries to imagine Mae in a professional environment- although she shouldn’t talk, she seldom wears dresses when teaching, it’s too risky with the threat of spills or open flames- and fails miserably. Amy can’t picture Mae taking up an office job someday, sitting behind a desk and writing reports or sorting through mail, and she can’t picture Mae pursuing a career as a teacher or a healer, either. Maybe a potioneer, of the very experimental variety. Mae would like to play the mad scientist shut up in her laboratory. 

“You should have brought your coat,” Amy reminds her, not the first or last time. 

Mae rolls her eyes. “We’re going right inside, unless you want us to walk two miles first to ‘build up character’, Mum.”

“Don’t get smart,” Amy mutters under her breath, then exhales in relief as the bus skids to a halt. She could have easily Flooed over with Mae, but she’s never been to Iris’ family home before, and that seemed awfully familiar, though they are friends. Shepherding Mae in front of her, they make their way to the front of the bus, filled with people on their way to New Year’s parties or pubs- some of whom already seem a little punch drunk- and out onto the street. Amy’s only ever been in Cornwall for the summer holidays before, but it’s certainly a much milder winter here than up in the highlands, aside from the blustering wind tearing in from off the ocean.

Mae looks disappointed with the lack of snow or even frost on the ground, kicking forlornly at some dead leaves as the Knight Bus disappears into the evening, brakes still squealing. Amy feels a little guilty; Mae is almost thirteen now, and spending her New Year’s with a bunch of professors is probably not what most teenagers would have in mind. But she doesn’t feel comfortable leaving her home for hours on end, and part of her is almost relieved, horrible as it sounds, that Mae hasn’t received any invitations from friends over the break. Amy feels she’s got reason enough to suspect everyone and anyone, at this point. The magical community is far too small. All it takes is one ‘coincidence’ and suddenly no one has any idea where her daughter’s vanished to.

Amy’s sometimes not sure what was worse. Worrying about Tom hurting Mae because he was convinced she wasn’t his child, or worrying about Tom hurting Mae under the guise of paternal care. It’s not that she thinks him this profound sadist. He might even convince himself that whatever he was doing was for the best. He’s certainly good at that. But nothing good is going to come of any interactions between him and her daughter. He doesn’t know how to be a father, how to… to express love in a healthy way, or to be gentle with a child’s feelings and supportive of their hopes. She’s not arguing that she’s up for Mother of the Year anytime soon. But Tom-

Just thinking about him and Mae alone together makes her nervous. Mae is stubborn, willful, and clever. She’s also impulsive and passionate. All it would take is her saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, and Tom losing his temper, or making a snap judgement when she refuses to do what he wants- It’s not that she has never considered it, before. When she was juggling a newborn and work, when she was exhausted after dealing with a toddler’s tantrums, when she was trying to do what seemed like a hundred things at once and Mae was crying or whining because she was hungry, or tired, or cold- Of course she thought, even wistfully in the moment, about what it would be like to have a partner, someone she could confide in, to share the burden with. Sometimes she even thought about Tom in that role, when she was overwhelmed and guilt-ridden. 

But that was just a child’s fantasy. Yes, it’s a pretty picture to paint, and doubtless he would have loved to help her paint it, but it’s not real. She can’t imagine him trying to settle down a shrieking toddler without losing his cool. It was hard enough for her, and she thinks she’s got a good deal of patience, compared to most people. The idea of Tom holding back Mae’s hair while she was sick and vomiting from a stomach bug, or coaxing her to use the toilet like a big girl, or giving her a bath and washing her hair while she shrieked about shampoo getting in her eyes, is absurd. 

Yes, in the abstract sense, he might like the idea of having children, of raising a family. But in reality, it would be a disaster. He would loathe it, all the grueling mundane grievances of parenting, the mess that a child makes, the fuss, the attention it demands. He would view it as a burden on his coldly regimented life, a distraction from his career, and worse, he would never have wanted to compete with a child for her attention. He would come home from work expecting her to shower him with affection and questions, to cheer him up or comfort him or make him smile or laugh, and she would be exhausted, filthy, and sitting on the sofa, a baby in her lap gumming on a toy or shoveling food in their mouth. It would very quickly lose all appeal for him, and he would blame her for it, or find some way to distance her from it so he would no longer have to ‘share’ her; hire nannies, a governess, send the child away-

Send Mae away. Amy plods along after Mae, who has now picked up a stick and is running it along the unending string of fences in this quiet, hilly neighborhood on the outskirts of Penzance. You can’t see the sea from here, but you can smell it, even in the dead of winter. 

_If I had no care at all for my political reputation or my relationship with Lydia, I could have you in court next week, stripped of your rights as her mother._

__

__

_It was an idle threat_ , Amy reminds herself sharply. _He makes a lot of those. He’s not a fool. He would never take that kind of risk with his career. He knows he cannot make this public. He can’t take her away from you without admitting that she’s his in the first place, and he won’t do that, he’s not going to sink his own ship._

But he could still take Mae away. Manufacture some sort of charges against Amy, have her thrown in Azkaban or under house arrest, wand confiscated, and have Mae pulled out of her care under the pretense of child protection. Dumbledore would throw his weight in, Dippet would raise a fuss, but- Amy’s breath catches momentarily in her throat, but she tells herself it’s just the cold. He wouldn’t do that. He likes to talk big, but he wouldn’t. He thinks of Mae as ruined already, a lost cause, the child that could have been but never was. He has no actual interest in being a father, he just wanted to rake her over the coals a little, make her squirm. 

Still, the thought of being permanently separated from Mae- of knowing she’s alive, but somewhere else, unreachable, being cared for or mistreated by other people, strangers, is almost worse than the thought of her dying. She told herself Mae would never feel as she did as a child, never feel abandoned or neglected, would never feel like the leftover remains of a life, swept into the trash. That she would never feel alone, or frightened of what the future might hold, that she would always have a home and someone who loved her, who would never leave her, no matter what. 

Amy swallows, and then Mae glances back at her, quizzical. She’s been quieter than usual since Amy told her the truth- well, the updated truth, that Tom knows exactly what she is to him. Amy knows they need to discuss it, it’s not a one-and-done sort of conversation, Mae needs to speak to someone about this sort of thing, but- she’s afraid the more she brings it up, the more she might inadvertently stoke up hopes of Mae’s that Tom wants her, that he cares for her, that he loves her. 

Amy remembers the look in his eyes that night a month ago well. He wanted a child. A figment of a child that never truly existed for him. He wanted the past, the memory. If any part of him still cares for Amy, it is just the memory of her as she was. That’s what he wants. The memory. Seeing her like this- an adult woman, who’s lived apart from him for years, who’s got a life and work of her own- it disturbs him. He has been thinking for years of the eighteen year old girl, as she has been of the boy. 

Well, she hopes they finally rid each other of their respective delusions in their last meeting. If any part of him didn’t hate her before, he must loathe her with all his might now. Not only did she take his child from him, she admitted to still being in love with him when she left. She knows it must agonize him, infuriate him, he’s not made of stone. The thought of someone loving him but choosing, of their own free will, to leave him anyways- she won’t pretend it wouldn’t cut deep for her, too, in his shoes. But she’s not in his shoes. 

She cannot afford to let her guard down just because he let her go, because he didn’t seriously hurt her. It hasn’t been very long at all. Merlin knows what he has in the works. He let her get away with it because he was overwhelmed, in shock, because he couldn’t think of what to do with her right then and there. He might come to some chilling conclusions in the time he’s had to get his head on straight since then. She no longer fears him killing her. But she and him both know there are many ways to hurt someone, to get revenge, that do not involve leaving a mark or raising a hand or even a wand. 

“Is this it?” Mae asks, pausing in front of a waist-high wooden gate, her breath misting in front of her. In the glow of the nearest street lamp, her hair is very dark, her eyes very blue. In the dim lighting, some of the roundness of her face melts away, and she could be- well, she is looking more like her father as she ages, not less. She may have Amy’s eyes, Amy’s nose and smile, but she has his high cheekbones, his regal brow, his long neck and thin build, and she even stands like him, graceful even when she’s slouching, light on her feet. 

“This is it,” Amy says, hoping she got the address right. She pushes open the unlatched gate and leads the way up the gravel driveway to the two-story brick home. It’s on a secluded street and has a much larger property than most of the surrounding cottages and bungalows, many of which are much newer homes. The walls are covered in ivy, creeping across the second floor windows and lining the gutters, but the lights are on in the first floor, and she can hear faint music and voices as she approaches the door. The small evergreen wreath on it looks brand new, as if it was just placed there with haste today, although it could just be charmed. 

There’s no doorbell, so Amy knocks once, then again when no one comes. Mae shifts from foot to foot, obviously cold. 

The door swings open all at once; Amy is surprised not to see Iris or one of the other professors, but a strange woman with a very familiar pointed, narrow face. 

“You must be Amy,” she says; her voice is a little lower and huskier than Iris’ chipper tones, but she has the same smile, even though her eyes and curly hair are brown. “I’m Marjorie- Marge, Iris’ sister. Please, come in- the wind’s terrible tonight, isn’t it?”

Amy ushers Mae inside, thanking Marjorie, who looks only a few years older than Iris, in her early forties or so, both taller and curvier than her younger sister. She leads them through the mildly crowded sitting room full of familiar faces, most of whom Amy nods and smiles politely at, including Dumbledore, Dippet, and Amell, and then into the conservatory, which has a peculiar pitched roof, like the inside of a chapel. The brightly colored stained glass windows just add to the effect, but it’s much warmer and homier feeling than any church Amy’s ever been in.

“Amy!” Iris is quick to spot them, and comes over with Sid and another person Amy doesn’t know, a petite black woman who smiles at Marjorie, saying something teasing about stealing her drink. Marjorie swipes it back and kisses her on her cheek.

“Marjorie, Amy, and this is her daughter, Mae, of course, my favorite future student- oh, what a darling outfit,” Iris exclaims, while Mae’s polite smile becomes slightly more forced, “and Amy, my sister Margie, and Daphne Wilde-,” Daphne inclines her head to them both, adjusting her thick glasses.

“Very pleased to meet you all,” Amy says, as she unbuttons her coat.

“Something to drink? Something to eat? Lucinda brought this shrimp cocktail, I am telling you, it is to die for-,”

“My mum said there’d be other kids here,” Mae interjects, pointedly.

Sidney chuckles under his breath, and points her towards a small card table in the corner, where Kalliope Witherspoon’s teenage niece and Lucinda Amell’s grandson both look incredibly bored. Mae trudges over to them without a second glance, her hands in her trouser pockets like a little mobster. Iris is pressing a drink into Amy’s hand, assuring her she’ll love it- “It’s not like you’re flying home!” as she asks where to put her coat.

“I’ll show you,” Sid says, rolling his eyes a little at Iris, who sticks her tongue out at him in a sisterly manner in response. 

Amy gratefully follows him back through the crowded rooms and into the opposite side of the house, in the hall beside the kitchen. Really she would have just as rathered spend tonight at home with Mae- she’s sure as hell sitting out the MESP gala this year- but Dumbledore was very insistent she take up the invitation, and she assumes there will be some sort of meeting of his… order at some point tonight, likely after the count-down. She’d feel a bit more assured if she knew who exactly was involved in this, but he’s been irritatingly opaque since last spring, and she hopes they’re about to get down to proper business now, what with the laws being passed, and- well, with Tom knowing everything now, or almost everything.

Sid is a gentleman in his way and does not try to kiss her until they’ve stepped inside the small office being used as a coatroom. It’s not that much of a shock; after their first night together back in May they hardly saw each other all summer, but when the school year picked back up, well- so did they. It’s not anything serious. They do not go on dates, they do not make plans. They do, on occasion, do stupid things like this, and right now she does not want to feel guilty or ashamed of it, she wants him to keep doing that thing with his tongue. 

When she almost upsets a pile of handbags and hats they both stop, somewhat abashed. 

“You look great,” he says, and she scoffs a little; she’s in a slightly oversized red cardigan and plain grey trousers; the only thing appealing about her is her dark lipstick, which now might be smudged. She inspects it quickly with her compact mirror, but it’s alright. “You clean up very nicely yourself, Professor.”

He smooths down his festive green tie, grinning. “Thank you, Professor.”

Amy giggles a little in spite of herself, then fixes her ponytail; it’s getting long, so she’ll have to cut it before school starts back up again. Women her age don’t go around with hair that comes down past their shoulders. Well, some of the pureblood witches do, but she’s not sure she wants to make a show of aligning herself with them, even if only in hairstyling. 

He checks the door, to make sure no one is coming through the kitchen and about to be on top of them. “I’ve missed you.”

“Well,” Amy sighs, “end of term papers to mark, and all that. Christmas shopping to get done.”

He shrugs. “I forget, sometimes, it’s just me and my mother for the holidays, so…”

His brother died during the war. She knows that by now. Amy touches his arm, lightly. “How’s this party going for you, then?”

“Well,” he says, “no one’s gotten too drunk and embarrassed themselves yet. June had a prior engagement, so the level of wit is about 50% less acidic. And Dumbledore’s got an almost absurdly endless amount of limes for everyone’s drinks, so I can’t say it’s been a bad night so far, all in all.”

She huffs in amusement, then kisses him quickly on the lips, just because she can. It feels like a defiant stab in the dark. No one can stop her. No one can see. Some small part of her is still allowed to be selfish and greedy. He smiles against her mouth, hands on her hips, one thumb tucked into her waistband until she pulls away, breathless.

Once you’ve been to one New Year’s party as an adult, Amy thinks, you’ve been to them all. People stand around and drink and chat and listen to the radio countdown, or play party games, or eat snack food. Mae doesn’t look entirely miserable with Audrey Witherspoon and Ronnie Amell, which she is taking as a good sign. Iris clearly enjoys hosting people, and spends all night flitting about like a pixie, to the point where Amy gets tired just watching her go. Dumbledore is rambling on some long winded story that also involves Professor Kettleburn, which Madam Rutherford the librarian pretends to be riveted by. 

Amy chats most of the time with Witherspoon, Amell, Sid, and Marjorie and Daphne, who have plenty of amusing anecdotes about Iris from their school days, including the time she almost convinced the old Divinations professor that she had inherited the power of prophecy from her mother, and preceded to try to predict that the woman would find love within the month. Within the month, their professor’s hair started to fall out from a misjudged beauty potion and her house caught fire, and Iris nearly failed the class that year. Sidney begins to chuckle so hard while sipping his whiskey sour that he almost chokes, and Kalliope has to pound him on the back, hard. 

“Is your mother here tonight?” Amy asks, curious, of Marjorie. “Or has she gone out to another party?”

Daphne glances away, popping an olive into her mouth from her plate, while Marjorie’s smile tightens slightly. “No… she’s upstairs, resting, actually. She’s had a horrible migraine on and off all day. We almost canceled tonight, but she was sure she’d be fine with a muffling charm on the door to block out all this noise.”

Amell promptly offers the wide variety of potions she just happens to have in her bag, and Amy takes that as her excuse to break out of the conversation, feeling a little sheepish. The clock on the mantle says it’s ten to eleven; she knows it’s prudish of her, but she’s already exhausted. She and Mae had a late dinner at seven before coming over, and it’s catching up with her. She glances at Dumbledore, wondering if he still means to covertly hold some sort of meeting. At this rate, half the people in attendance will be sleeping through it. But she shouldn’t assume every guest here is in it. Somehow she can’t see Nigel Romilly or Herbert Beery being big on the idea of joining an underground resistance group. 

She does wonder if she ought to try to pop home with Mae, to make sure she actually gets some sleep tonight. Mae’s stuffed herself with leftover Christmas cookies and tarts, it looks like, and is now lounging in arm chair, eyes heavily lidded, head lolling slightly. Or maybe she’s gotten into the punch. Perish the thought. Amy does not need to even consider the idea of her drinking, or going to ‘real’ parties with people her own age, or getting anywhere near the opposite sex. 

“Well,” Lucinda had made her way over to her, her attempts to medicate Iris’ mother’s headache apparently rebuffed. “I certainly expect to be getting overtime for this,” she murmurs, not that she needs to lower her voice over the din of the part. Amy would be even more cautious if Carmody were here, but she isn’t, thank God. Probably ringing in the New Year with her fellow acolytes, slaughtering a pig or lamb or whatever the Knights of Walpurgis do for the year's end. Admittedly Amy should have paid more attention to the extended sections on pagan rituals they learned about in History of Magic, but she was too busy confusing the various groups of Celts. Maybe they're throwing Tom a little party. 32 tonight. Her stomach twists uncomfortably.

“It was voluntary,” Amy smiles over her glass.

“At my age, nothing is voluntary,” Amell grouses. “Still. Better this than another gala, hm? Certainly more comfortable attire,” she gestures to her own cardigan and pearls with a chuckle. “Cheers. To the upcoming final year of a decade.” They clink their glasses together, just as Mae finally rouses herself from her seat, and wanders over, face already set in the mulish expression of a child who wants to go home, right now. At least Amy won’t have to worry about her staying up late reading tonight. 

“Mum,” she begins, in a voice that is only not a whine because of Lucinda’s presence. “Can we please-,”

She’s interrupted by the clock tolling eleven, and a smatter of laughter, as some people obviously forgot it wasn’t midnight already and began to set off their party poppers or shoot sparks from their wands. 

“Can you make it another hour?” Amy asks her. “Or I can apparate you home in another fifteen minutes or so, alright? Oh, love, you’ve got some popcorn in your hair-,” she brushes it out as Mae flushes, jerking away in mortification.

The loud thump from upstairs all but rattles the ceiling. The conversation dies down for a moment. Lucinda and Amy exchange a look. Both are very familiar with the sound of someone collapsing. Iris immediately apparates to the floor above, then lets out a strangled yell. 

Amy and Lucinda don’t know the house and thus have to take the stairs, but Dumbledore was apparently willing to risk it, and is already in the cluttered bedroom by the time they burst in. Amy is shocked by the darkness of the room, especially the thick curtains blocking out all light over the windows, but supposes that makes sense for a woman suffering from migraines. “Get me a light,” Amell snaps, and several wands begin to glow before Marjorie turns on a lamp. 

Rosamund Penvenen must be in her mid-sixties, but looks as though she could be in her eighties, her face lined and wrinkled, her hair snow white and long and tangled. She’s gaunt and shrunken in Dumbledore’s grip as he checks her pulse, and Amell probes at her haggard chest, then massages a spell into it with one hand while she casts with the other, murmuring a revivifying incantation. Amy holds her breath; what are the chances the woman’s just, well… had a stroke or a heart attack? But she feels a pulse in the wrist, weak but present, so at least her heart hasn’t stopped.

Rosamund’s eyes flutter open; they are the same striking blue-green as her younger daughter’s, albeit red-rimmed and watery with age and exhaustion. “Mother,” Marjorie gasps out in relief, grabbing her other hand. “Are you alright? Did you trip?”

“Give her some space, Marge!” Iris snaps, pulling her sister away as Dumbledore and Amell try to help Rosamund stand and make her way into her rumpled bed. Outside, the wind rattles at the windows, and ivy rustles. 

“I’m fine,” Rosamund murmurs. “Just… had a dizzy spell-,” she suddenly stops talking, jaw slackening as she sways on her feet. 

Amy grabs her other arm and gets her onto the bed, supporting her hunched back. “Lucinda, I think she’s having a seizure, do you have any-,”

Dumbledore’s hand lands on her shoulder. Amy jumps glancing up at him, and then Rosamund goes rigid before her, as if- well, as if possessed. Instinct kicks in, and Amy scrambles off the bed. Iris’ mother is staring straight ahead, not at any of them, nor the wall behind them with its painting of the seashore, but into space. Into a void. Iris is murmuring something under her breath- a curse, a prayer? Marjorie begins to cry. 

Daphne lunges at the bedside table, where there is official looking pen and soft grey parchment paper stamped with the Ministry seal. Dumbledore’s sharp-eyed gaze follows her, and he looks about to say something, but then-

The voice that comes from Rosamund Penvenen is not that of a frail old woman but of a woman years younger, years stronger, soft but firm and clear, lilting in speech as if she were reciting poetry or reading off a script she’s memorized by heart. 

“ _And I have seen the starveling in his paper crown_ , 

_Who will have defied death twice but not thrice,_

_And his death shall be gifted by a child,_

_Born to those of his own covenant._

_He will mark the child as his equal,_

_And one must perish by the hand of the other,_

_For neither can live while the other survives._

_The child will be delivered as the seventh month dies,_

_Anointed in the blood of a mother,_

_And more powerful than you know._

_For my lord Death will not be denied._ ”

There’s a whispering sound as Daphne stops recording; Amy glances over as the paper in Daphne’s hand folds up in on itself like a spider and vanishes. The words are already fading in her ears; she tries frantically to recall the start of the prophecy, but all she can remember is the last few lines… child… seventh month… mother’s blood… Death. It’s not as though she has any other prophecies to compare it to. Are they all this cryptic? What is a starveling? Something about a covenant, maybe? It could be about anything, it’s not as if the gift of prophecy is bound to always be about kings and queens, and- 

Dumbledore exhales as if in disappointment; Rosamund Penvenen blinks, mumbling to herself, and then looks around with wild eyes. “God damn it,” she says softly, and then a little louder. “Morgana’s left tit! I’d thought I was rid of it, this year.” She glances at her distraught daughter, and gives a shaky smile. “It wasn’t so terrible this time, was it?”

“On the contrary,” Dumbledore says mildly. “I think the Ministry might be quite interested in your predictions this year, Madam Penvenen.”

Well, that is one foolproof way to end a party early; Nell thinks. Most of the guests depart within minutes, offering their well wishes for Iris’ mother, bidding everyone an early new year. Mae has fallen asleep on a sofa; Sidney puts his suit jacket over her, and those who’ve elected to remain eye one another up, no one quite sure where anyone stands. Dumbledore waits until Marjorie has seen Daphne off with a kiss before he clears his throat. 

The guest list has been rapidly narrowed down to Amy, Witherspoon, Amell, Sidney, and the Penvenen sisters. 

“Well,” Dumbledore says, “we might as well make ourselves comfortable while we wait for Horace.”

“Tea, coffee, anyone?” Sidney asks, stepping into the kitchen. 

“I’ll have some tea,” Amy murmurs, and follows the rest of them back into the conservatory, leaving Mae behind, still slumbering, in the living room.

“Horace has worked up the nerve to venture out into the night, then?” Lucinda asks archly as she settles down in a seat. “Thought he’d been walking on eggshells ever since he slunk back.”

Witherspoon huffs in amusement, while Iris is quiet; Amy puts a hand on her shoulder as she sits down next to her and Marjorie. 

“Horace has been preoccupied with winning back the trust of the current government,” Dumbledore says, “and with helping Matthew Abbott recuperate from his ordeal.”

Amy scowls. “I thought Matthew was released from St. Mungo’s weeks ago.”

“Some scars take more time to heal than others.”

“Which means he’s not going to say anything else on the matter,” Sidney snorts, as he comes back into the room juggling several cups of tea, two of which are floating around his head. “No offence, Professor.”

“If we are to embark on this journey together,” Dumbledore says with a sardonic edge, “I feel ‘Albus’ might suffice among colleagues.”

Sidney hands him his tea. “Force of habit.”

“And what is this journey, exactly?” Lucinda Amell presses. “Obviously Horace has agreed to be your man on the inside, since Gaunt already won him over years ago. And Carmody…” she trails off, eying the others.

Amy stiffens. Dumbledore says, calmly, “For those of you not already aware, June Carmody has been reporting on the activities of the staff at Hogwarts for nearly two years. And as I have learned from Amy, her and her husband are indeed active members of the Knights of Walpurgis.”

Iris makes a noise of disgust.

Sidney sighs heavily. “That’s a pity.”

“Well, June was never much one for magical-muggle relations, after her childhood,” Witherspoon murmurs. 

Amy frowns. “Did something happen to her? She is a halfblood, isn’t she?”

“June’s father abandoned their family when he learned his wife and daughter were witches,” Kalliope says, brow creased in sympathy. “It was just before she came to Hogwarts. I don’t have all the details, of course, but hers was a… very troubled home after that.”

There’s a brisk knock on the door; Iris goes to answer it, and returns a minute later with Slughorn, who looks almost identical to the man Amy recalls with varying degrees of fondness from her school days. He is still portly, white-haired, and red-faced, and in his red and gold robes and dark green vest and tie, could pass for one of Father Christmas’ senior elves, come down from the North Pole. She might expect a more paranoid response from a man who until relatively recently was in hiding, but he seems to have recovered enough of his ordinary geniality to go around the room shaking hands and beaming, pausing when he gets to her.

“Miss Benson,” he says, as if she were still a girl of sixteen sitting in his classroom, “You cannot imagine how pleased I was to here you’d been brought on. I knew you would go far. Truly.”

Amy is a little doubtful of that; Tom was the one in Slug Club, not her, but smiles politely anyways. “It’s good to see you’re alright, sir.”

“Oh, never better,” he says, even as he collapses in an arm chair and gulps down the cup of coffee Marjorie offers him. “Just fine, really- had a lovely reception when I crossed the border- only two hours’ interrogation with the Ministry security forces! I’d been dreading a weekend stay in Azkaban,” he smiles, but the look in his dark eyes belies its jovialness. “But we’ve done and dusted that up, now, and I am pleased to say I’ve been welcomed back into the fold with open arms.”

“So you’re back with the Knights?” Sidney presses. “When was their last meeting?”

“Not quite,” Slughorn allows, smile slightly more strained. “One might call it a… probationary period, while I prove my loyalty anew. Tom isn’t so trusting these days, I’m afraid.”

“Nevertheless,” Dumbledore cuts in. “Horace will be a valuable source of information. It is, of course, imperative that you all maintain cut ties with him in public, and he will not be returning to teach… for the time being,” he says, when Slughorn looks almost petulant. Amy supposes he did always love his job, and feels a bit strange to have taken it from him. “But if he can convince Minister Gaunt of his… renewed support, we should have some crucial insight into the Knights’ plans for the coming year. However, I believe our primary concern should not be the fraternal order, but Tom’s government.”

“The former he still cannot publicly avow. The latter… well, as you all know, legislation has been passed in regards to the Statute, its treatment of the use of magic against muggles, and its treatment of muggleborn students. Hogwarts has been informed that every incoming muggleborn first year for the next school year will be assigned a case worker and will be subjected to mandatory reports and surveillance, if deemed necessary. Perhaps even more pressingly, the amendments to the Statute will make it much more difficult for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to prosecute dark wizards and witches who target unsuspecting muggles. Virgil Mulciber, I’m sure,” and here Dumbledore’s cool tone turns slightly acidic, “is thrilled for what this means for the pending cases against him.”

“Come on,” Iris snaps, suddenly. “Who’s going to believe that it was self defence? That girl they found in the Thames just happened to cut herself into pieces? He’s a murderer.”

“He’s a very useful tool for our Minister and his ilk,” Dumbledore says, “and he is not the only one whose family connections will make the chances of them ever seeing justice doubtful.” He steeples his longer fingers together. “However, I believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel, if you will excuse my reliance on proverb. The horse may be out of its still, but it is not yet out of the barn.”

“That was two proverbs, Albus,” Lucinda comments dryly.

Dumbledore elects to ignore that. “Horace has, as it happens, discovered one valuable ally for us in Matthew Abbott, who will be returning to the force shortly, and who, if all goes well, be able to secure the ear of Gregory Pike, the DML head.”

Amy sent Matthew and his wife their usual card for Christmas. She knows she should reach out, but maybe they'd rather she stay very, very far away from them.

“Pike’s as much in the old boys club as any of them,” Sidney shakes his head. “He’ll never turn on his fellow Slytherins.”

Amell shoots him a dirty look. 

“Gregory Pike may have more substance to him than you presume,” Dumbledore says. “And I have found us another comrade-in-arms, so to speak, albeit perhaps an even more unexpected one.” He removes what seems like two glossy business cards from the voluminous sleeve of his robe, setting it down on the table in the middle of them. 

Amy peers down at it, brow furrowed, then feels a jolt of recognition- and guilt, at one of them. “Irene Greengrass?” she blurts out. 

“Yes, she’s made something of a surprising career in law for herself… and has become rather highly sought out for her knowledge.”

“So what?” Marjorie asks, raising an eyebrow. “You intend to sue the Ministry?”

Witherspoon has picked up the other between two ringed fingers. “Or solicit a story on them? Gilda Skeeter? Albus, be reasonable. The woman’s another Daily Prophet hack. All those stories on Lydia Rosier? It’s fluff stuff, propaganda.”

“I intend,” Dumbledore says, “to expose a rot. And I cannot do that without the assistance of a scalpel,” he taps Gilda’s white card, and then Irene’s black one, “and a clamp.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I didn't think I'd get it up before next weekend, but here we are. I know I keep promising a Tom POV and not delivering but I promise we will hear from him again soon. Now that the story is really off the ground running and we've established all the main characters and their competing agendas, we're going to pick up some speed in terms of time and the plot. By that I mean my goal is to cover the year of 1959 in 3/4 chapters, max. For reference, 90% of the plot in this fic will have taken place in the 1950s and 1960s. I don't want to be constantly skipping ahead in time and confusing everyone, but I also don't want it to feel like it's dragging or stalling out, in terms of pacing.
> 
> 2\. Amy is still a little shocked Tom, well, actually let her go after their last meeting. She called his bluff, sure, but part of her didn't think it would actually work. Has this helped her paranoia? Not much, but at least she is not hiding (as much) critical information from Mae, so they're more on the same page. We also see in this chapter that she is still hooking up with Sidney on occasion, and that the Order of the Phoenix (although it does not have its official title quite yet) is getting started in earnest, although we're nowhere near the level of the canon guerilla warfare and subterfuge.
> 
> 3\. Mae's feelings about wanting to go home after 3 hours are pretty much me at most parties. 
> 
> 4\. I've never written any sort of prophecy before and I 100% admit to including some lines from Sybil Trelawney's canonical prophecy from 1980, namely 'He will mark the child as his equal' and 'Neither can live while the other survives' because I just think they're cool lines. Another general disclaimer is that like every fantasy story ever, this prophecy is not set in stone, can have multiple interpretations, etc. Amy hears it firsthand but finds herself forgetting the exact language used just as quickly, so it's not like everyone is going to immediately break it down and analyze it. Prophecies have fallen out of favor in the magical world, and are no longer considered the gospel truth, so to Amy and other characters, there are more pressing matters to be concerned with.
> 
> 5\. We will be seeing more of Matthew pretty soon, as well as his boss, Gregory Pike. And of course, June and Arthur and Lydia. The next chapter will take place in March 1959.
> 
> 6\. As always you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	34. Tom VI - Matthew IV

LONDON, MARCH 1959

Tom has been in this park exactly once before, despite having worked in Westminster for years now. When they were ten- when he was ten, some wealthy donor funded a rare outing for the orphanage to visit the gardens at Buckingham Palace. He doesn’t remember much about the visit, which was doubtless little more than a photo opp for the wealthy and powerful to pretend they cared a whit about a group of shabbily dressed, grubby little urchins from the East End, but after it was over, they were shepherded across the street to Green Park, where they spent the rest of the day picnicking and running wild. 

Then there had been no hint of what was to come, no linger promise in the air, no hope of an extraordinary future. He was ten years old and in lieu of any other options, had committed himself to being accepted into a good school so that he could go on to an elite university and, failing all else, claw and scrape his way out the humiliating cycle of poverty and everyone else seemed happy to jump in line for. He has a distinct memory of the bark of a tree trunk against his back, a book in his lap, and then warm fingers tickling the back of his neck, causing him to flinch, snap the book shut, and shove her away. 

She’d gone sprawling out into the long grass (which they were not supposed to be disturbing, although the park rangers were more focused on scaring off the older boys who were trying to sneak cigarettes by the rubbish bins while leering at passing pedestrians), snickering, and then showed him a closed fist, nails stained green. “Guess what.”

His response had been to pinch her knuckles, hard, until he left an angry red oval indent in the lightly freckled skin. She’d drawn back, pouting, and kissed away the stinging pain, then opened her dirty palm to reveal a daffodil head, gone brown with rot. “Watch,” she’d whispered, and squeezed hard, as if trying to burst a fruit. The flower had crumpled in her grasp, but bright yellow had leeched back into the petals, as if rejuvenated. A passing bee drew closer, smelling the pollen, and landed in her palm. Tom blew it away with a breath that sent it gusting up into the air, buzzing helplessly.

“Don’t be mean,” Amy had snapped.

“I don’t like insects.”

“It’s just trying to eat.”

“Well, I was trying to read,” he’d retorted.

“Fine,” she’d huffed. “I’ll go show Ruth, if you don’t care-,”

He’d grabbed her by the wrist, tugging her back down sharply when she started to clamber to her feet. Her faded blue dress was grass-stained, too, and her twin braids were coming loose in little tendrils of dirty blonde hair, already starting to darken the mousy brown it would be in five years time. “Don’t,” he’d warned, then added, peevishly, “We promised not to tell anyone but each other.”

She’d jutted out her lower lip in annoyance. “You don’t even pretend to care what I can do. But when you figure out how to do something neat, I have to act like it’s the best thing ever, or you throw a fit.”

“I don’t throw fits, I’m not a little child,” he’d snapped back, releasing her wrist. 

A smirk played on her lips. “You are a child.”

“I am not!”

“Little, ickle, baby Tom-,”

He smacked her with his book, not nearly as hard as he could have, but hard enough to wipe the smug look off her face. In response she flung the daffodil at him, then ripped up grass to throw. “Stop it,” he’d hissed, scrambling away like a crab as she followed, around the trunk of the tree. “Stop, stop- Amy!”

“Minister?

He looks up, meeting the unaffected gaze of an Unspeakable. Despite having the most explicitly magical jobs within the Ministry, Unspeakables are perhaps on par with most aurors in terms of being able to blend seamlessly into muggle surroundings with little fuss or anxiety. His suit is sober, conservative, and utterly anonymous. Hat on, he looks indistinguishable from the thousands of muggle men heading into work this morning, briefcases in hand, faces set in grim preparation for another long day behind a desk. 

The magical world reviles muggle mundanity, their craving for conformity and acceptance above all, but Tom thinks it is one of the few things they share in common, wizards and muggles. An all consuming desire to belong, to be one of many, to have some sort of shared lifestyle, shared code, they can all commiserate over but secretly take pride and pleasure in. 

“Edevane,” he says, simply. 

Edevane smiles briefly, then sits down beside him. From a distance, they look like any two colleagues, sharing a short reprieve in the cold spring sunshine before the clouds threatening rain converge again. The park is green enough; it was a very mild winter for London this year, and the rain has certainly helped anything flowering. Tom watches a worm writhe beside the pathway before him, and with slow, curious sort of interest, decapitates it with the toe of his leather shoe. 

“I apologize for the delay,” Edevane says. He is not so old, perhaps in his mid-thirties, but speaks with the gravity of a man decades older. “I know you would have preferred to have this conversation in January, but we’re always short-staffed, and I wanted to do due-diligence before discussing the matter with you.”

A bird chirps shrilly nearby. 

“You do understand,” Tom says, “that I did not enjoy having to manufacture a counterfeit prophecy to release to the public, while not knowing myself the possible threat of the genuine one. If it is was genuine, that is.” 

He’s entertained himself with the possibility that it is not, that the Penvenens made it up out of petty spite, a pointed jab at the head of the government that has so disdained their counsel. If they did invent it, he is very, very much going to enjoy ripping out the withered roots of their family tree, from top to bottom, and tossing them into the fire. The mother was always a paranoid old bat, and the daughters not much better. The thought of one of them being a colleague of Amy’s, of possibly teaching his daughter, irritates him greatly. Divination. Where those who can’t, teach. 

“The prophecy is genuine,” Edevane says. “We’ve concluded that much, thus far. One of my colleagues paid a follow-up visit to the house. Rosamund Penvenen has no memory of delivering it, and there are no signs that her memory has been deliberately tampered with. It would appear to be very much a real delivery.”

Tom exhales. Prophecies frequently fail. If they always came true, they would not be prophecies, they would be something else, more ordered and scientific in their accuracy. And it’s not that he has been racking his brains over it these past few months. He has larger concerns than fretting over a few vague lines threatening some sort of far-off retribution. There were prophecies about all the great sorcerers and enchantresses, threatening hellfire and damnation and misery. There half a hundred prophecies of how Grindelwald would meet his end, many of them seemingly genuine, and he still lives, albeit in captivity. 

But Tom is not playing the same game as those power. All of them sought power through puppeteering muggle kings and queens, or through wondrous and terrifying feats of dark magic and enchantment. He is taking a longer, but safer path, with less chance of flying too close to the sun and being sent plummeting back down to earth. None of them were willing to truly work for it, wait for it. They wrenched power away, bloody-handedly, instead of patiently waiting their turn. They didn’t get the keys, so they had to break down the doors. He has already accomplished more than any of them. He has succeeded to head of state without a drop of magical blood split. Or, very few drops, at least.

“And have you concluded its meaning, then? Since it is… genuine?”

Edevane pauses. “Once again, Minister, I would warn you that prophecy is a nebulous thing. Many possible interpretations could be taken-,”

“In your professional opinion, then,” Tom snaps. “Give me your best hypothesis, let’s call it that.”

“First,” Edevane says, “I would like to clarify with you all who were witness to this prophecy. At the time of its delivery, the Penvenens were hosting a gathering. They claim the majority of the guests were downstairs celebrating, and correspondence would seem to suggest as much, from what we’ve gathered. However. They freely admit that Rosamund Penvenen suffered a bad fall shortly before its delivery, and was tended to by Albus Dumbledore, Lucinda Amell, and Amy Benson.”

Tom tenses. “They heard it?”

“It would seem so, but the chances of remembering it accurately after the fact are slim. I would really only consider Headmaster Dumbledore as the only one capable of retaining the information. The other two…” Edevane shrugs. “Well, a schoolteacher and a nurse are hardly a threat.”

Tom says nothing, then nods for him to go on. 

“As you know, the prophecy was sent to the Department of Mysteries directly, as is required by law. No one else other than myself and my fellow Unspeakables have had access to it. No one but you has been informed of its content.”

“I would hope so,” Tom murmurs.

“Yes. Now, as for its contents… I think we can agree, Minister, that ‘a starveling in a paper crown’ might be a rather… derogatory manner of referring to someone in a position of power.”

“A starveling,” Tom says, derisively. “A starving man. A Gaunt. Yes. How clever of the Fates.”

“That is one interpretation that could be taken, certainly. The rest of the prophecy seems to explicitly to refer to a possible child, born in the July of this year, who will bring about, through some means, the death of this leader. ‘Of his own covenant’ might suggest that the child’s parents will be those the man might consider to be friends or allies. The blood of the covenant being thicker than the water of the womb, and so on. Alternatively, it could refer to anyone with whom this person has had legal proceedings or any sort of professional or personal dealings with, whether that be a contract, a treaty, a pact or business deal-,”

“Get on with it,” Tom says, voice sharpening.

“Well. That aside, by some means or another, the child will be considered or rendered equal to the man whose death he will decide. ‘Anointed in the blood of the mother’ is also quite open to interpretation. It could suggest that the child’s mother will die birthing him, or that he will simply be born in blood… as most children are. It may not even be his own mother, but any mother, whose death will have some sort of impact on him. What does seem clear is that this child will be quite strong in his magic.”

Two young women in raincoats pass, talking and laughing and pushing prams. Tom and Edevane both fall silent until they are gone.

Tom lets out a breath, then digs his fingers gently into his trouser legs. “Is that all?”

“As far as we know at this point, yes.” Edevane turns slightly conciliatory. “I would be cautious about leaping to any… dramatic conclusions for the time being, sir. Even if we are to take this at face value… the child would still be, well, a child for years and years to come. There is plenty of time with which to-,”

“I agree,” Tom cuts him off swiftly. “Best not to make any hasty decisions. In the mean time, I want immediate and continued access to the list of all magical children born in Britain from here on out. It will be helpful with our efforts to secure muggleborn children as well. Two birds with one stone.” He stands up, adjusting his suit jacket. Edevane hesitantly follows suit. “How many magical children would you say are predicted to be born this year?”

“This year?” Edevane blanches. “We’re in the middle of a historic boom in births, Minister. I could not-,”

“Your best guess, then,” Tom says coldly.

“Several hundred, perhaps. The incoming class for 1959 should be a little over two hundred. Assuming that rate has increased with every year following the end of the war-,”

“Say four hundred divided by twelve,” Tom interrupts him yet again. “That leaves us with thirty-odd children born in July. In the second half of the month, sixteen or seventeen. For the sake of this theory, of course, assuming births are evenly distributed. It should be simple enough to narrow it down, in the coming years.”

He begins to walk, then stops. Edevane is regarding him for the first time with something other than placid tolerance or vague worry. “Sir. Are you suggesting-,”

Tom smiles thinly. “Of course not. I’m not a monster. But prophecies fail. Frequently. With fatal results for their chosen ones. I’d call it an environmental hazard, if nothing else.”

Norbrook is waiting for him back at the office, as expected. “Sit down,” Tom says, opening the door for him and striding past him to his desk. “How was Pike this morning? Irascible as ever?”

“Preoccupied with a new case,” Norbrook says, cautiously taking a seat. He was one of the few who did not look down on Tom when he first started in Improper Use of Magic. He’s been well-rewarded for that humility, although he doesn’t know it yet. “They’ve found a body outside Manchester. In a ravine in Blackley. Boggart Hole Clough. Automobile wreck, the muggles have been assured. No other details at this time.”

“Perhaps it really was the boggart,” Tom says sarcastically, and resolves to take Castor Mulciber to task about managing his nephew’s proclivities better the next time he sees him. Perhaps a real job would do Virgil some good. It would certainly eat up some of that pesky free time that keeps getting him into trouble.

“And Abbott is back on the force,” Norbrook lowers his voice, although there’s no need in this sound-proofed room.

“Pity,” Tom flips through some of the files left for him in his inbox. “I’d hoped they’d keep him roped up with paperwork and evaluations for another month or two.”

“I thought you’d be more upset,” Norbrook ventures. He sometimes likes to take a brotherly tack with Tom, which Tom does not mind, up to a point. It allows Norbrook some degree of confidence. God knows he probably gets little enough of that at home. June is a formidable talent, but a bit of a shrew, truth be told. Tom would never put up with that kind of thing in his house. He thinks briefly of Lydia. He can’t quite decide whether he wishes she was with child already or not. There’s a possibility that she’s barren like her aunt, he supposes. 

“Upset?” Tom looks up from the papers, scrutinizes Norbrook’s lined face. “No. Abbott’s still addled from his… adventures abroad. And rumor has it that it’s been frosty on the homefront for him since his grand return. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the beginning of the great decline, for him. Pike is my primary concern. Pike is not a bumbling idiot with a badge. Pike I cannot afford to dismiss. So I want you, in your new capacity, to go about finding some chinks in that armour of his, and find me a needle to stick in them, so that I’m not walking on eggshells around one of my department heads.”

“My new capacity?” Norbrook frowns.

Tom’s lips twitch upwards. “You’ve been promoted to office chief. Congratulations. You can expect a significant raise. I’ll even throw in a late Christmas bonus.” He sighs, feeling at the cup of tea on his desk, gone cold. “Now, on your way out, send someone in here with a kettle.”

“Thank you,” Norbrook utters, standing. “I won’t let you down.”

“I’m sure of it.” Tom waves him out, flipping through his calendar book, then pauses. It’s March 15th. He takes up his quill, and in tiny, neat handwriting inscribes, M’s birthday, then closes the book. He supposes he should find some way of sending a gift, next year, that won’t be immediately picked up by the school authorities, wondering why the Minister of Magic is sending letters to a schoolgirl. His temple throbs, as rain begins to patter against his window. He wonders if she ever thinks of him as more than a mere figment, her father. He wonders what her mother told her, truly. Did she tell her she loved him at all? Or did she lie to their daughter, too, over and over again?

BOGGART HOLE CLOUGH, MARCH 1959

Matthew doesn’t make it very far before the new boots Evie bought him for Christmas are completely coated in mud and muck. Sighing under his breath, he makes his way down the soggy, damp slope leading to the crime scene. It’s overcast and raining lightly, the droplets stinging at his face. He rubs at his chin; he’s been growing out a beard since his release from the hospital, and it’s finally produced more than just scratchy stubble. Evelyn used to always joke about him growing one, said she liked a man with a bit of hair. Now-

He swallows hard, and pushes the thought away. It’s his first day back on the job, and he can’t afford to be distracted. He has to prove he’s capable of handling this investigation without needing to be babysat. Pike was already dubious about letting him back onboard, and Matthew almost wishes Slughorn had never given him back his memories at all. It was much easier when he legitimately had no idea what had happened over the course of those six months. Easier for him, easier for Evelyn, for everything. But he has a duty, and he can’t just toss it aside. He made his choices, and now he has to live up to them. He can’t just ignore this. It’s like Dumbledore said in his letter. There comes a time when a man has to decide whether he’s going to go back to sleep or fight to stay awake. 

“There he is,” Joan drawls at his approach, her hands in the pockets of her fleece coat, hat at a jaunty angle, smile wide. “The man of the hour!”

A few of the patrolmen on duty look around at her exuberant greeting and shoot tense nods or long stares his way. Matthew tries to look unfazed by it all as he finally reaches Joan’s side. Unlike him, her shoes are immaculate; she must have put some sort of dirt-repellent charm on them. “Nice to see you too, Joan.”

She nudges him gently with an elbow. “Oi. Cheer up, will you? You look like you just swallowed a lemon. Know the weather’s horrid, but back on the job, eh? You should be thrilled! We were all sure Pike was going to hold off even longer; you know how particular he is,” she wrinkles her nose. “How many forms did he make you fill out? Fifty?”

“Enough to give me muscle cramps,” Matthew manages a smile, forcing away the last of his nerves. He saw Applewhite in passing this morning, and was shocked at the wave of fear that rose up in his stomach. Anger, he’d expected, even embarrassment- Applewhite almost killed him, and for what? A publicity stunt? An old grudge from Gaunt? But it was different. Before he’d respected the man, even been in a little in awe of his easy charisma and effortless physicality. The way you might be of a tiger in a zoo, behind the glass. Now he’s been in the pen with the tiger. It’s hard to look at him with anything but terror. 

He went to the dueling range this past weekend. He’s not helpless. He’s grown used to his new wand, it now rests comfortably in his hand, doesn’t feel strange or foreign anymore. But the fear was there all the same. It made him feel like a coward. A disgrace. He certainly feels like one at home. It’s not that Evie wasn’t relieved Isola had saved his life. But that he hadn’t contacted her for months-

“The dangers?” she’d barked, tears in her eyes. “You know what the real danger was? Thinking you were dead! That you were never coming back! Do you know how horrific that was? How hopeless I felt? For God’s sake, Matthew, we may not have held a funeral, but I still mourned!”

He doesn’t know what to say to make it better, and he will not lie and claim he regrets not telling her. The message could have been intercepted. It could have put her and Beth in serious danger. And Beth… she’s just now comfortable around him again, but she still won’t call him Da or Dada like she used to. And she’s so much bigger now, more a child than a toddler. He hadn’t realized what six months away could do until he came back. 

“Matthew?” Joan is staring at him, concerned. 

“Sorry,” he says. “Just lost my train of thought. Where’s the wreck?”

Cars aren’t even permitted in this part of of the reserve. The muggles were driving along an old maintenance road designed just for park workers. The automobile is a crumpled heap of metal half-sunken into the shallow ravine, which comes up to a grown man’s chest. It looks like it wrapped itself around a tree that does not exist. The body was not found in the car at all, and is relatively intact, which to Matthew seems to suggest that perhaps the car was in fact destroyed after the murder, since it seems unlikely someone would have survived that sort of damage to the automobile and been able to clamber out; all the doors were crushed, compacted, windows shattered. 

Joan pulls back the black cloak covering the corpse. Matthew does pride himself on one thing; he has not lost his composure around the dead. Certainly, it’s been enchanted by the first Ministry workers on the scene to not decay any further, so the smell is muffled, but it’s still not a pretty sight. He wades into the water a little deeper; it laps around his ankles; to inspect the dead young man. Boy, really, he can’t be much older than twenty. 

“ID?” he asks Joan, who hands him a battered leather wallet. 

“John Clarke,” Matthew says, examining the license and what looks like a university student ID card. “Born 1940. Student of the Royal Manchester College of Music.” 

“Guitarist,” Joan comments.

Matthew frowns. “You could tell by his hands?”

“He keeps a pick in his wallet.”

Matthew empties it out into his gloved palm. It’s bright cherry red, engraved with initials with a sappy heart stamped around them. “Gift from a sweetheart, I suppose.”

“We’re still looking for her,” Joan’s tone darkens.

Matthew pauses. “There was another passenger in the car?”

“They pulled a handbag from inside, and they found a woman’s shoe buried in the mud.” She exhales, pulling out a small black and white picture from the damp wallet. “She would fit his type.”

Matthew frowns. Legally, technically, none of them are ever allowed to state, in public, suspicion of Virgil Mulciber. But it’s become increasingly apparent, over the course of the last five years, that when a murder is flagged as being potentially magical in nature, and it involves the death of a young muggle woman, usually of a certain age and appearance, that the chances are good there may be one uniting denominator. Mulciber’s been brought in for questioning on three separate occasions over the course of the past two years. They’ve never had enough to hold him for longer than a few hours. He walks out as jauntily as he walked in, grinning. 

The young couple in the small black and white photograph, obviously taken at one of those little photo booths they have on boardwalks or at carnivals, is grinning as well, although not with smug malice but unrestrained merriment. Matthew is used to seeing pictures move, and stares, befuddled, at this one for a moment before he realizes. John Clarke had coke bottle glasses and neatly combed blonde hair. His girlfriend, whoever she is- the pick is initialed S. J.- has a full face and dark hair falling in soft ringlets around her beaming face as she kisses her boyfriend on the cheeks, arms slung around him. 

“Susan Jameson, according to her purse,” Joan says. “Fellow uni student. Eighteen. Classically trained pianist. She had business cards on her. Taught lessons part time, to pay for school.” 

Matthew looks down at the body at their feet. Water-logged and chalk white in death, John Clarke’s neat blonde hair is disheveled and greenish from hours in the mire, and his glasses are missing. Matthew hunches down to better inspect him. His pale eyes are wide open in horror, face in rictus of the expression just before a scream. “Killing Curse,” he surmises.

“He was quick about it,” Joan says, shortly. “He’s never used that on any of the women.”

Matthew frowns. “We won’t know for certain until we find her body. It could be someone else’s work.”

“We don’t have a large enough population for that many maniacs to be running about,” Joan mutters, but Matthew’s unconvinced. After Bilbao, he’s not so sure. After all, muggles can go on killing sprees, and that’s knowing they have no way to kill someone with just a few words, no way to easily vanish damning evidence into thin air, no way to quickly heal themselves with a potion or a spell. Magic is power. Power adds to a sense of invulnerability. And when people feel invulnerable… sometimes they care less and less about the consequences of their actions, and more about the rush they get in the moment. 

He glances back up the ravine at the dirt road above them. “So what do we think? He runs them off the road, they get out of the car on foot, he attacks them both down here? Why would he move her body? This is an isolated, rural spot. It’s the middle of March. He’d be long gone before anyone found them.”

“Maybe he wanted privacy,” Joan glances up and down the length of the rocky streambed. “It’s less exposed in the forest. He could have killed Clarke here, and abducted the girlfriend to a second location.”

“Then she could be anywhere,” Matthew exhales. “She could be on the other side of England, at this point.”

“She could be,” Joan concedes. “But I think it’s more likely he wanted to enjoy the chase here. Time of death is estimated at seven o’clock last night. They snuck in after hours to park and have a bit of fun, most likely. They’re joyriding around, he ambushes them, kills Clarke quickly, and then settles in for a game of hide and seek with her. He knows she’s got no way of calling for help, the park’s shut down for the night, and she’s never going to outrun him on foot. Her best hope would be to get back towards one of the rest areas and look for a pay phone. So I say we follow the road in a southern direction, see if there’s any signs of a chase or struggle.”

Matthew looks at her for a moment then nods. “You’re a damn good detective, you know,” he says, with a wry edge.

“Detective?” she scoffs. “What are we, muggle coppers? I’m a bloody brilliant auror, thank you very much.”

He smiles. “That too.”

Her smile wavers, and he sees a tinge of regret in her dark eyes. He knows Joan blames herself for what happens, and now blames herself even more for the obvious discord between him and Evelyn, even though none of it is her fault. He wishes he could tell her the truth, but- it’s still for the best that she be blissfully oblivious. Besides, she’s so obviously happy with Renata now, it just doesn’t seem right to spoil any of that for her. Let her believe the best of Gaunt.

They follow the road a little ways, gravel crunching underfoot, until Matthew stops short. “Wait. I see something.”

He leads Joan off to the side, where the road gives way to a hiking trail, and scrutinizes a weathered, pale wooden sign marking the trailhead. “There.” There’s a bloody smear up the post, as if someone had caught hold of the sign to try to steady themselves as they stumbled.

Joan crouches down to inspect it further. “Thank Merlin the rain hasn’t washed this away.”

She shouts back to one of the loitering patrolmen, “Get a photographer over here!”

“Why would she veer off the road?” Matthew mutters. “It’d be even harder for her to run uphill.”

June shrugs. “Maybe he cut her off with a spell, maybe she thought she could lose him in the wood, in the dark, hide out somewhere. Not a terrible plan, when you’re just trying to survive.” Her shoulders are taut with tension, all the same. 

“We will pin the bastard,” Matthew says. “I promise, Joan.”

“I’m going to nail him to the fucking wall,” she says, “and I want to see his face while I do it. The Dementors are too good for the likes of him.”

They follow the trail up a ways; blanketed by the trees overhead, it’s been undisturbed by the rain or wind. 

“Here,” Joan says, “footprints.”

They venture off the trail and further into the brush and mud, down to a gully full of burbling stream water. 

Joan sighs. 

There’s a discarded woman’s jacket in the water, caught on a log. “She has to be around here somewhere,” she mutters, and they fan out their search, but other than some more blood, the trail goes cold there. 

Matthew stops, though, at a bramble, and calls Joan over. “Come look at this. Animal prints.”

Joan grimaces as she picks her way over to him. “They could have taken what was left of the corpse. Foxes, maybe-,”

“These aren’t fox prints,” he says slowly.

The paw print in the mud is massive, and there is a clump of thick tufted grey fur caught in the bramble beside it.

Joan’s dark eyes go wide. “Wolf,” she says. “That’s… unusual.”

Matthew gives her a look. “The muggles haven’t found any populations of wolves in Britain for centuries now. They hunted them to death. So either we’re breaking new ground here, or…”

“You don’t have to say it,” Joan snaps, then massages her forehead, groaning. “Christ. It was a full moon last night, wasn’t it? We’re going to have to deal with Control of Magical Creatures. They’re insufferable.”

“We’re going to have to report that a werewolf has been sighted somewhere south of Scotland for the first time in decades,” Matthew says shortly. “And that our murder case just got a bit thorny, if one was killed by magic, and the other torn to shreds and eaten.”

Joan examines the tuft of fur, then glances back at him. “Or not eaten…” She trails off, the implication clear.

Matthew shakes his head. “No werewolf would have enough self control. She had no way of defending herself enough in order to get away with just a bite.” 

Joan presses her lips together. “I want all the local muggle hospitals checked anyways. Better safe than sorry.”

Matthew nods, and they both straighten up, as thunder rolls in the distance. Joan suddenly huffs a bitter, humorless laugh. 

“Her coat,” she says. 

Matthew glances back towards the ruined fabric, covered in mud. “What about it?”

“It’s red.”

So it is, the scarlet darkened to a purpling maroon by the elements, like a nasty bruise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. So like I said last chapter, the pace is picking up and we are going to have more frequent time skips so as not to get too bogged down now that we know all the main characters and most of the main plotlines. Next chapter should take place in June/July of 1959 and will involve Lydia strutting her stuff, a very tense school board meeting, government meddling, flagrant abuses of power, and prophecy shenanigans.
> 
> 2\. Sorry that Tom did not get too introspective this chapter, as I know many people were hoping for his immediate reaction to the confirmation that Mae is in fact his daughter and that Amy still loved him when she left him. However he's mostly, well, repressed the hell out of it is and is trying to not even acknowledge it to himself (the fact that Amy loved him but left anyways, at least, he is able to face the knowledge that Mae is his child at last, so... one step forward, two steps back?). I promise we will see Tom and Mae interact... soon-ish, I just want it to be properly set-up, since his access to her is limited while she is in school.
> 
> 3\. At the Ministry, the only people aware of the contents of this latest prophecy are Tom and a few select Unspeakables, who he trusts because... well, they are Unspeakables and have made multiple magical oaths and vows to never reveal any of their work to the outside world. A phony prophecy was published in the Prophet so as to not arouse suspicions. Tom is banking on the Penvenens being too intimidated by him and his goons to dare come out and challenge this. He is also aware that Dumbledore, Amell, and Amy were present for the delivery, but really only considers the fact that Dumbledore heard it to be a real threat to him.
> 
> 4\. Edevane is doing his best literary analysis here, but is obviously biased since he's working for Tom. So this is just... their best guess as to what this prophecy means. Them referring to the child as a 'he' has less to do with them guessing the gender and more to do with it being the 1950s and the masculine being the default, as well as general sexism. Lucky for Tom, he knows exactly when every magical child is born due to them being added to the Hogwarts List upon the moment of their birth. His math skills aside, he thinks he can comfortably narrow down all possible 'chosen ones' to a small group of 16/17 infants... not exactly a comforting though. Edevane is, loyalty aside, understandably a little worried this might turn into a 'King Herod orders the massacre of all boys under the age of two' incident.
> 
> 5\. Matthew is back on the job! Slughorn has returned those missing memories to him, but it hasn't been sunshine and roses. His wife is furious he left her in the dark about his whereabouts for months, his relationship with his daughter is damaged, and he and Joan are dealing with a magical serial killer and possibly... werewolves? It's probably not necessary for me to include werewolves in every single HP fic of mine, but I can't help myself. 
> 
> 6\. As always you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	35. Amy XV - Mae XV

HOGSMEADE, JULY 1959

AMY

“Wake up,” she says, to the young man on the mildewed and moth-eaten cot. When he does not immediately respond, she gives him a light shake, rooting for a pulse in his neck. His skin is cold and clammy, despite the musty warmth of the cellar. She freezes when she hears footsteps pounding above the, sending dust drifting down through the odd slender shaft of light. Floorboards creak and groan. Somewhere, someone is sobbing or moaning in pain, and the sound stretches on and on and on.

“Wake up,” Amy demands, then stills as she feels the weak pulse in his neck. “Hey. Oi. Wake up.” She tugs down the collar of his filthy shirt, stiff with dried blood, and yanks out the leather cord she knows his dog tags must be hanging on. Peers at in the dark; she’s could levitate him up, but she still needs to apparate out with him, and the risk of seriously injuring him while he’s unconscious is too high. “Shelby,” she reads off the tags. “Shelby.” She decides to guess at what the F might stand for. “Fred. Fred Shelby, wake up.” His eyelids twitch, but he does not stir. Growing desperate, she snaps, “Frank, wake up right now,” and they open immediately, brown and glazed over as if he’d been sedated. 

He stares at her, gripping his shirt with her hand on his neck, then flinches away in fear. Amy swallows back the pain, and stands up, putting all of her might into pulling him to his trembling legs; he’s like a colt, he seems liable to collapse at any moment, gaunt and weak. “Come on,” she says, and then switches into the protocol she’s been drilled in, over and over again. “My name is Amy Benson. I am a healer with the British Ministry. A medic. Do you speak English? Parlez vous anglais? Sprichst du Englisch?”

“English,” he gasps, and she can hear it in his accent, but his gaze is wild and unfocused as he stands, gripping her forearms so tightly she knows he’ll leave bruises. He’s taller than her, but most men are. “Who are you?” That’s what he says, but the look in his eyes says, What are you?

“My name is Amy,” she repeats herself as calmly as she can, even as there’s a tremendous crash and a muffled scream from above them. “I’m here to help you. Hold onto me. I’m going to get us out of here.”

He stares at her, uncomprehending, then hesitantly wraps an arm around her shoulders, leaning some of his weight onto her. Amy tightens her grip on his hand, closes her eyes, and thinks of the darkness of the forest. They vanish with the crack of a whip just as the cellar door bangs open, half off its rusted hinges. 

“Wake up- Mum?” She gasps aloud, the waking world coming back into focus as someone shakes her shoulder. Amy straightens on the sofa, rubbing at her head; she must have dozed off while editing this paper for MESP; the light in the cramped sitting room is much different, closer to later afternoon than midday. 

Mae stands in front of her, looking torn between exasperation and concern. She elected to cut her own hair the day after term ended, which Amy of course had to rescue before she scalped herself, and the hair she has kept nearly to her shoulders for the past year is now cropped to her chin once more. 

Amy’s not sure if it’s because Mae simply decided she prefers her hair shorter, or if some part of her is trying to cling to her childhood haircut, in light of everything else around her changing. She has a note on the fridge to remind herself to take Mae to Madam Malkin’s next weekend. She’s thirteen and really ought to start wearing a training bra, though Amy is dreading that conversation just as much as she ever dreaded the one about menstruating and sex. 

But that’s really the last thing she needs or wants to be thinking about right now, her attention distracted by the crumpled note in Mae’s hand. “Did an owl come from the castle?” It’s been nearly a week since classes finished and the students went home, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Dumbledore wanted to start up Order meetings with more regularity now that everyone has more free time, after the usual hectic few months of the spring term, what with exams and final grades and students panicking about the end of the school year. 

“Yes,” says Mae, evasively, and Amy can instantly tell she’s read it. She frowns, and takes it from her, then swears. 

“Mae, when did this come in?”

“Two hours ago?” Mae shrugs, then concedes, “Alright, more like three.”

“You should have woke me up!” Amy clambers to her feet, running a hand through her mussed hair, also newly cut, though still longer than her daughter’s bob. She’s tried the bobbed look before. It doesn’t particularly suit her. “They want me up there at six- for the love of Merlin- shit-,” she glances down at her watch. “Mae, it’s a quarter to five!” She’d no idea it was this late in the day. 

“It’s just the Board of Governors,” Mae says, “Who cares if you miss it?”

“It looks very poorly if I do, considering that they bloody well know I live right in the village!” Amy groans under her breath, gathering up her books and papers and hurrying into the kitchen. “I have to start on dinner for you, right now, God knows how long I’ll be stuck up there for. What do you want to eat? Soup and sandwich?”

“It’s July,” Mae complains, following her into the kitchen, where Salome is meowing loudly for his own dinner. Amy shoes him away with a shake of her slippered foot; Mae can feed him herself, he’s her cat. “I don’t want soup-,”

“Then sandwiches,” Amy tries to make a neat pile of her things on the cluttered kitchen table, then gives up. “Get out the cold cuts and the bread, alright? And please use a clean knife. I have to go up and shower.”

“So I’m making myself a sandwich,” Mae mutters. She sounds like a husband having a sulk that his wife’s too tired to cook, Amy thinks with a tinge of dark humor.

“Well, love, you have to learn sometime,” she says dryly, then darts upstairs, “And feed your cat before he brings more dead mice in here!”

By the time she’s showered, fixed her hair into something less damply frizzy and more presentable, tying back her ponytail with her customary scarf, this one polka dotted, and changed into one of her nicer blouses and a pair of dress trousers, she comes back down carrying her heels in hand to see Mae sitting at the kitchen table, picking at a sandwich. Amy feels a pang of sympathy. It’s barely a week into the summer vacation, but she doesn’t want Mae to be bored and miserable. Last summer was bad enough. Of course she wants- needs- Mae to be safe, but she can’t just keep her locked up here whenever school is out. 

“Listen,” she says, as she balances against the wall to put on her shoes, “why don’t you owl- er- Marian, and see if she’d like to come visit sometime soon? On the weekend? I could take you girls to the cinema in Inverness.”

“Marian’s from Reading,” Mae says, with a haughty edge, as if civilized society began and ended along the Thames, “she’s not going to want to go to some dinky cinema in Inverness.” She’s torn off the crusts of her sandwich and is eating them separately, then says, “Can’t I go over to hers? Her parents are nice. And they don’t even work for the Ministry. They’re anti-establishment artists,” she adds, with a hopeful edge.

“We’ll see,” says Amy, unable to forget that the last time she let Mae skip over to the Darvesh household, several hours later she wound up at Tom’s bloody wedding reception. Still, she knows that is mostly the result of Mae’s deception, less the result of any planned interference by Marian’s innocent parents. At least the mother is a photographer, and not a journalist. Having secured her shoes, she walks over to the counter to pick up her purse, checking her reflection in the back of a spoon from the sink. “Hopefully they won’t keep us for too long, but I should be back by nine o’clock at the latest.”

“What’s the meeting about?” Mae asks, through a mouthful of bread. 

“Chew,” Amy reminds her, then says, “Oh, all their… surveillance of us this past year, probably. It’s nothing to worry about,” she says, more to herself than Mae, “they’re just going to give some list of silly grievances over class sizes or changes to the curriculum, and we’ll pretend to agree to it all, and then they’ll be on their way.” She wouldn’t be shocked if she got singled out, given Lydia Rosier’s involvement in the whole thing, but she doubts they’d push to sack her- her older students have had decent results on their OWLs and NEWTs, so they can’t claim test scores slipped under her tutelage, and as far as she knows, she’s had no complaints.

“Maybe I can go see Valerie,” Mae suggests, as Amy kisses her on the head. “Her parents are muggles. So that should be safe, right?”

Amy makes a noncommittal noise, not sure what worries her more- the possibility of Mae winding up in danger because one of her friend’s families might be spying or somehow controlled by Tom or his cronies, or the possibility of Mae being around defenseless muggles who could not even hope to keep her safe should something terrible happen. 

Not to mention the risk to the Statute- the last thing she needs is Ministry attention because Mae got excited and showed off some ‘accidental’ magic around Valerie’s muggle family. She wound up in detention the last week of classes because she got into an argument with some boy in her History of Magic class, and managed to hex his nostrils shut as if super-glued- without using her wand. 

Disgruntled by this, Mae takes a long drag of her chocolate milk.

“You’ve got to drink some water,” Amy reminds her. “You’ll rot your teeth with all this sugar. Really.”

“You can just fix them,” Mae smiles toothily at her. 

Amy sighs, then walks out of the kitchen. “Lock up after me! And clean your room!”

“Bah, humbug!” Mae shouts after her, making Amy laugh as she shuts the door behind her.

It’s a warm, pleasant evening outside, and Amy walks slowly down the lane, intending to apparate right up to the castle gates once she reaches the corner- she’s not going to make that hike up there in these shoes. She pauses outside the Carmody-Norbrook home, peering curiously for a moment at the shuttered windows and the broom propped up against the front door. She’s got no idea when the baby is due- no one knew until the end of term, June either got off scot free in term of not having much a belly and very few symptoms, or she managed to keep it all under wraps with a combination of potions, charms, and dressing to hide her… development. 

Amy can’t really blame her for that, having once been in a somewhat similar situation, but it’s the talk of the staff room whether June will be returning in September. If they were muggles, it wouldn’t even be a discussion, because the answer would be clear. Women don’t go right back to work after having babies unless they’re poor and desperate. Amy herself was poor and desperate and went back to work two months after having Mae, despite at least not having to pay for her meals or housing- she still needed to buy formula, because she wasn’t producing enough milk, and it’s not like there were any hand-me-down baby clothes for her to snatch up. 

She walks on, thinking that at least an infant will likely put a serious damper on their spying. Tom must be furious, if he knows, or if he’s just found out about it like everyone else. Then she wants to pinch herself for thinking of him so casually. It’s not that she’s suddenly ceased to fear him, more like, she thinks, she’s got to cope somehow with the weight of this, since it’s not as if he’s going to magically wake up one day and forget all about her and Mae. Now there’s an idea. God, she should have become an obliviator instead. One memory wipe. Problem solved. Granted, her problem solved, specifically. It wouldn’t make him any less of a corrupt tyrant in the making, would it?

Sid and Iris were waiting for her in the antechamber; Amy feels an almost childish glow of happiness in her chest, that they would do that for her. 

“What’s it shaping up to be?” she asks, walking in between them. 

“Bad,” Iris says. “The entire Board is here. All seventeen of them.”

Amy groans. More than half of the board of governors is pureblooded, three quarters of them male, and a solid chunk of them members of the Sacred 28. “Dippet must be in a tizzy.”

“Oh, he is,” Sid mutters darkly. “And Dumbledore looks thunderous, but there you have it. A few lucky bastards went on holiday and got to miss this circus, but we are, yeah?”

Seeing the Great Hall like this, with only a small portion of the torches lit, and the lower tables and benches piled up beside the walls, leaving a cavernous space before the sole high table on the dais, is almost unnerving. The shadows are long and dark and there’s a musty, unwashed quality to the air. “At least they’re treating us to dinner,” Iris jokes, as they approach- it’s not as if the Board is spending so much as a sickle on it!

Amy sits down in between Iris and Lucinda, who smiles at her tiredly. The rest of the professors present look a mix of bored, tired, or outright dismayed by the short notice. The Board members look a little too pleased about this turn of events. Dippet is whispering back and forth with Dumbledore, and Amy starts in surprise when she realizes Lydia Rosier is in fact, here. Lydia never interviewed her over the course of the past year, but Castor Mulciber did, the old prick, and he’s sitting beside her as she chats with another pureblood witch, before glancing down the length of the table with her trademark sunny smile. Amy supposes she should count herself lucky, at this point, that Tom did not decide to drop in. 

“Well,” Dippet finally says, voice only slightly strained, once they’ve all settled. “I do declare this meeting in session.” He bangs on the table with a small gavel, eliciting a few bemused chuckles, before it transfigures back into his wand, which is very impressive, Amy will admit. 

“Excellent,” Lydia leans forward in her seat, those green eyes of hers gleaming in the torchlight, which turns her strawberry blonde hair to lustrous red gold, even pinned back under a lacy hat. “I’m so thrilled to be back here again. If find I’ve come to truly consider Hogwarts a welcome sanctuary, of sorts, from the stresses of the political arena- and the gossip magazines-,” she pauses to allow for a few polite titters- “and I cannot say how much I have come to respect and admire you, the hardworking staff, and all you do for your students. I have every hope that our findings will support and reinforce the valuable lessons you teach our children, and that we can pursue a very close relationship between my husband’s new government and this treasured school in the future.”

Amy has a sudden sinking sensation, and can see it on Kalliope Witherspoon’s face as well. Even stoic Victor Morgenstern looks a little wary, and Dumbledore’s face, though smooth and relaxed behind his greying beard, is very still. 

“With that said,” Lydia says brightly, “I shall give the floor to my dear friend and colleague Mr. Mulciber.”

Castor Mulciber stands, smoothing down his dress robes. The resemblance between him and his nephew is striking. “We’ll start with what we found praiseworthy,” he says, smiling genially, “before we move on to our… list of pressing concerns.”

‘Pressing concerns?’ Iris mouths at Amy, who tries to give her a reassuring look, but is distracted by Mulciber’s dry tones as he begins reading off his roll of parchment.

MAE

Obviously she wasn’t going to actually clean her room, and it’s the first time she’d had the house to herself all week, so Mae puts on some music and lies on her bed, flipping through the worn and tea-stained electives pamphlet Professor Finch handed out to all the second years at the start of June. By now she’s already sent in her two choices- Divination and Care of Magical Creatures, obviously, and as interesting as some of the others sound, she also doesn’t fancy back-breaking amounts of homework for the rest of her school years, not when she can’t drop any of her core classes until after OWLs.

At least Divination will be with Professor Penvenen, who is friends with Mum and always fun- she reminds Mae a little of Aunt Ruby. And Care of Magical Creatures should be exciting, it has to be, what with Professor Kettleburn looking more like a pirate than a teacher, what with the hook-hand, peg-leg, and eye-patch. Malcolm claims his sister told him the eye-patch isn’t hiding an empty socket but a cursed eye that can see into the future, but Mae is pretty sure that was a rare case of Minerva McGonagall actually cracking a joke, and Malcolm just didn’t get it.

It’d be nifty to be able to predict the future, though. What if she were a seer instead of a parselmouth, like Professor Penvenen’s creepy mother? But her prophecy wasn’t even that interesting; Mae read it in the papers a week later, and it was just some generic stuff about peace and prosperity for the coming decade. Yeah, right. She’s pretty sure the muggles haven’t been able to get through a decade without starting some stupid war somewhere since the 1800s, at least. If ever. 

Mae runs her fingers down the once-glossy facade of the pamphlet, then tosses it aside as Sal jumps on the bed beside her. She likes the song coming on next, so she scoops her familiar up in her arms, letting Sal claw his way onto her shoulders, as she scoots around the room, swinging with an imaginary partner. She can’t say her second year was boring, but at least Mum’s not treating her like such a stupid child anymore. She’s thirteen now, a proper teenager, and sometimes she peers at herself in her mirror and tries to envision a grown woman’s face staring back at her, but then it’s just her again, Mae, puffing out her cheeks and blowing out her bangs in exasperation.

Sal paws at her face, wanting to be let down, and Mae lets him hop off her shoulders and onto the bed, singing along to the music filtering grainily through the record player.

“Well, you go your way and I'll go mine/Now and forever 'till the end of time/I'll find somebody new and baby/We'll say we're through, and you won't matter anymore…”

Salome yowls through the end of the song, to Mae’s delight, then jumps off the bed and races out of the room. Mae snorts, taking off the record and sliding it back into its sleeve. “What are you doing, you silly cat!” she calls after him, setting down the Buddy Holly record on her desk and stepping into the hallway. Salome is hiding under her mum’s bed; she can see the faint glow of his yellow eyes. 

“What, did my singing scare you that much?” Mae teases, crouching down in the hall and pulling a face at him through the doorway. Now she’s thirsty; she’d swear it’s hotter in this cottage than it is outside, even with all the windows open. Mum won’t let her keep the back door leading into the garden propped open when she’s gone, though it’s so stupid. Mae trots downstairs in search of a glass of water, tugging at her rumpled shorts, and playing with the yellow plastic snap beads looped carelessly around her neck, a birthday gift from Marian, who always remembers everyone’s. Mae supposes she should probably start trying to at least give people cards, or something.

She turns into the kitchen, humming in perfect tune under her breath, and snatches her favorite cup off the drying rack, then turns on the faucet to get herself a drink. What she will say is that the tap water here tastes way better than the water back in Gibraltar, but that’s probably just because it’s from some magic faerie well or something. Mae glances out the kitchen window into the dusky twilight as she fills her cup up, then catches the reflection of something strange in the glass. She glances casually over her shoulder, sees the stranger in the sitting room for the first time, and screams.

The cup clatters to the floor, spilling water across the mat, and the faucet spurts wildly out of control, even as she pushes away from it, lunging for the back door. It’s locked, of course, and as she tugs at it desperately, trying to undo the latch, the faucet quiets and turns itself off, and the door stays firmly shut, no matter how hard she pulls. Mae turns back around, terrified, and presses herself up against the wood of the door, her head knocking against the glass panel, staring wildly at her father. So not quite a stranger, not really. He’s sat down in her mum’s favorite armchair, and hasn’t even got up, just turned his head casually to look at her. 

With a wave of his hand, her cup picks itself up off the floor and floats gently back over to her, prodding against her clenched hands, rooted in her wrinkled tank top. Mae takes it, if only to have something to grip. 

“Why don’t you get your drink of water?” he suggests. “You’ll make yourself sick, carrying on like that.”

For an instant he sounds so much like her mother that she hates him, hates him as she has never hated anyone, hates him as she would if he came to her wearing her mum’s face as a mask, and she feels a wild rush of energy that makes her want to throw something, or scream again, or curse him. But her wand is upstairs, rolling around on her desk, and there is nowhere to go. She can’t get out the back door, the kitchen window is too small for her to clamber through, and to reach the front door, also locked, she’d have to go past him. 

He’s still waiting patiently, as if for a small child to catch up to what he’s saying. “Go get some water,” he says, again. “You’re spotting up.” There are red blotches all over her face and sternum, from the swirl of panic churning in her belly. 

Mae scoots from the door towards the sink, unwilling to take her eyes off of him for even an instant. When she reaches the sink, she shakily sets her cup down on the counter, then lunges for the wooden block where her mother keeps her cooking knives. She’s never stabbed anyone before, but she’s chopped dead rodents and birds into bits for snakes to eat before, and it can’t be that different, can it? No sooner has her hand closed around the hilt of the biggest carving knife her mum owns then it rips itself out of her grasp and buries itself in the low ceiling above her, raining down small pieces of plaster. Mae gasps. The wooden block seals over, like a stone, with a strange crunching noise, all the other knives embedded inside it, like the sword King Arthur had to pull out to be crowned. 

He is standing up now, the Minister, his wand out, though he tucks it away as she gapes at him. 

“That wasn’t very well-thought out,” he says, reprovingly, like a teacher would when she gave an answer she knew was wrong. “If you’re not thirsty, come here.”

Mae has the terrible sense, for a moment, that if she refuses and stays where she is, he will make her come over to him, and that he will not have to move a muscle to do so. She steps forward, still gripping tightly the hem of her top like she would when she was anxious as a little girl. She pauses when she reaches the kitchen doorway, only two yards from him now, unwilling to go any further. She wants to be brave and not look scared at all, but it’s very hard, being so close to him. He’s dressed the same as he always is, in a very nice suit, tailored as good as anything Auntie V’s family could make. His leather shoes are gleaming, and his dark hair- the same shade of dark brown as her own, black in certain lights, is slicked back from his pale, narrow face. 

Up close, he seems bigger than she expected, then the picture of the slim man addressing crowds from behind a podium would suggest. He’s not bulky or even that muscled, but his shoulders are broader and his hands and feet bigger than she’d thought. She doesn’t know. It’s like as if a character from a picture book peeled themselves off the page. He’s very tall, or at least, looks even taller in the small room; he’d have to duck his head a little to walk into the kitchen, or he’d knock it on the doorframe. 

He must see the naked fear on her face, as much as she’s trying to convince herself it’s anger, that she’s angry, that she doesn’t give a damn about him, she wants to hurt him, she wants to kill him, he hurt Mum, he deserves to die-

He stands up, and Mae shies away with a muffled little sound that she never wants to hear come out of her mouth again, a sort of panicked little whimpering gasp, involuntary and humiliating. To her surprise, he raises his hands, palms towards her, as if to reassure her- why would it, though, when he barely needs a wand at all?- and steps back, away from her, retreating to the opposing corner of the room, although that’s not very far at all.

“You can stay there,” he says, in an almost gentle tone, as if trying to reassure a wild animal. “Whatever you’re more comfortable with.”

Mae grips the doorframe with her hand, as if to anchor herself. 

“You can’t be in here,” she says. She thought she’d sound strong and unafraid, but it just comes out a croaky sort of whisper.

He looks bemused. “And why is that?”

“Because- because we have wards. How did you get in?”

He smiles. It makes Mae very uneasy. “Yes. Did your mother put those up herself? They were very interesting designs. She used goat’s blood to line the foundation. Very innovative. And all that salt…” His smile compresses in on itself. “They were a bit of a bother to get through, but I’d say she should really consult with a professional, next time. I got away with just this.” He shows her his left hand; all his fingertips are burned, badly. It must hurt horribly, but he doesn’t seem to feel it. 

“I don’t have her talent for healing,” he says, “I wouldn’t suppose you have any balm?”

Mae knows they do, but she’s not giving him any. She shakes her head, minutely.

He sits down in the old chair in the corner, then starts. Something is hissing nearby. It’s Salome, on the stairs, back arched, tail all sparky and twitchy. Mae feels a flare of affection- brave Sal, trying to help her- then an overwhelming crash of fear. Minister Gaunt is staring at her cat, looking a little miffed. He raises two fingers from his uninjured hand, as if to snap-

“Don’t!” Mae blurts out in a panic. He looks over at her, his irritation fading to something like curiosity. 

“I won’t hurt him,” he says. “I was only going to send him back upstairs.”

“Don’t you touch him,” Mae says, venomously, and is pleased to hear some strength return to her voice. “You leave him alone.”

“Have it your way,” he says, mildly, and lowers his hand. Salome stays where he is on the stairs, still hissing, then scampers down and scurries over to Mae, twining protectively around her ankles. “He’s very fond of you, isn’t he? I’m surprised. I never liked cats much, myself. They kill snakes, you know.”

“Lots of things kill snakes,” Mae snaps. “He’s my familiar.”

“Your familiar?” he looks almost pleased by that. “That’s an old-fashioned word.”

“I like old fashioned things,” she retorts, even though it’s sort of a stupid thing to say.

“Like what?” He arches an eyebrow at her.

“Like… like Sherlock Holmes books, and Gone With the Wind. It’s a film,” she adds, shortly. “You never saw it, probably.”

“I can’t say I have. What do you like about it?”

“I don’t know. I just do.”

“I saw a film once, with your mother,” he says. “It was called Casablanca. Have you seen that one?”

Mae is not sure how they went from knives stuck in the ceiling to chatting about films, but worries he might do something bad to Salome or her if she refuses to talk to him. “Yes,” she says. “I like Ingrid Bergman. The actress. She was Joan of Arc, too. I liked that one.”

“Up until she’s burned at the stake,” he says. “They thought she was a witch.”

Mae hunches her shoulders, rocking back half a step.

He seems to sigh. “Mae. I am not going to hurt you.”

Mae narrows her eyes at him, which seems to disturb him; he frowns. “Won’t you sit down?”

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says, insistently. “You- what if someone saw you here? You don’t want that, right? Because no one’s supposed to know about me?”

His frown fades some into a more neutral, composed look. “No one saw me come in. No one will see me leave.”

“Then go,” Mae snaps, then wonders where that flash of nerve came from. 

He smiles briefly. “You have a little temper, don’t you?” Like your mother, his eyes are saying. They are cold. She’s always thought of people with darker eyes as having warmer ones, comforting shades of brown, but his are icy, even without being blue or green. 

“I’m not afraid of you,” she lies, “and my mum’s not afraid of you. Just leave us alone!” Her voice rises slightly. “It’s not fair, what you’re doing to her!” Genuine anger creeps in, better and more sustaining than nerviness.

“What am I doing to her?” he asks, plainly.

“She-,” she catches herself, then says, in a lower voice, “she doesn’t deserve to have you… you threatening us or- or trying to hurt people we know just- just because you’re angry.”

“You think I’m angry with her?”

“Yeah, and it’s stupid!”

He seems surprised by that; he blinks. Salome growls. “You think I don’t have a right to be angry with her?” he presses. “Do you know what she did, Mae? Did she tell you? How she ended things?”

“Yes,” Mae retorts, “and you deserved it!”

He doesn’t like that; now his eyes narrow. “I deserved to get to you know. You-,” he pauses himself, then says, in a more restrained tone, “You are my daughter, Mae. I wish we hadn’t had to meet like this. But I was tired of waiting. I already missed so much. Your childhood. I couldn’t miss anymore. Do you think that was fair? To take you away from me?”

“You would have hurt me,” she says, sharply. “You would have hurt her. She told me you hurt loads of people. Just because they made you mad. You would have done it to us, too.”

He moves to the edge of his seat, locking eyes with her, and says, plainly, and clearly, “I would never hurt you, Mae.” His brow furrows. “I will never hurt you. You have my word.”

“She said you were a liar, too,” Mae sneers back at him. “You’ll just say whatever, is that it? Whatever makes people do what you want?”

“I don’t need to lie,” he says, quietly, “to make people do what I want.” The knife in the kitchen ceiling finally falls loose to the ground with a loud clatter. Salome yelps and races under the kitchen table in terror. 

Mae’s heart begins to pound again.

“You’re frightened,” he says. “I’m sorry. What can I do to make you less frightened?”

“Leave us alone,” she says. “Forever.”

He regards her carefully. “You don’t want to know me? Your father?” 

Mae shakes her head, but there are tears pricking at her eyes, to her shock. It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s not fair. She wishes he was someone else. Anyone else. Or just a different sort of person. If he was good, and- and wanted good things, it wouldn’t have to be like this. They could be a family if he wasn’t such a vile shit. If he didn’t hate Mum. 

“I don’t believe you,” he says, softly. “You’re not curious at all, Mae? You’re a very smart girl. I’ve seen your records. You did very well on your exams this year.” He pauses. “I’m proud of you.”

“No,” Mae bursts out, shaking her head. “Don’t- you don’t get to say that! You- you weren’t there! You’re not- you’re not my dad, you’re evil! You’re horrible,” she spits out, “and you hate my mum, and you hate me too, you’re just- you’re lying to me to try to get to her, so- so you can hurt her again!”

“I don’t hate you,” he says, slowly, pointedly.

“You hate her, then.”

He is silent. “I’m not going to hurt either of you,” he says, after a moment. “But you know I can’t ignore you. You’re my blood. My daughter.”

She scowls at him. 

“I’d like to get to know you,” he says, “and for you to know me, and then you can decide if I’m horrible and if I hate you or not.” He pauses again, then says, “I have something for you.” 

Mae wipes at her eyes, angrily. “I don’t want it.”

He puts a wrapped package down on the coffee table; Mae eyes it the way she would a venomous spider. It’s not very big, but it might be smaller on the outside than it is on the inside, like Mum’s purse. Minister Gaunt glanced around the sitting room once more, gaze lingering on a frame hanging slightly crooked on the wall beside him. It’s a watercolor sketch of their garden behind the clinic back on Gibraltar.

“Did your mother make that?”

Mae says nothing, stony. He looks back at her. 

“You’re not a little child,” he says. “I won’t lie to you. I am very angry with your mother. I may always be very angry with her. I don’t trust her anymore than she does me, I imagine. But I have never deliberately harmed her, and I will never harm you. I have a responsibility to you. To make sure you have the sort of life you deserve.”

Mae has to look away from him, her face flushed scarlet. It’s too much. She wants him to go away. She doesn’t want him to be here, in the same room as her. It doesn’t feel real. 

“And you deserve a life where you know both your parents,” he says, “and where you know that they care for you. Even if they no longer feel the same way about one another.”

“I don’t believe you,” Mae says, to the floorboards. 

She hears him exhale.

“I hope that in time, you’ll be able to trust me. I’d like to trust you, Mae. I think you’re a very clever and brave girl.” She hears him stand up, and her gaze snaps back up to follow his every movement. 

“I’m going to leave now,” he says. “And your mother is going to be very upset to hear I stopped by.” He examines his singed fingertips again. “I’ll redo your wards on my way out.”

“Why?” Mae mutters. “So you can break them again, next time?”

That gets a small sliver of a smile out of him. It looks nothing like the smile he wears in the photographs for the news, or the smiling boy in the yearbook. “I’m hoping that next time, I won’t need to.”

Mae folds her arms across her thin chest, then backs away hurriedly towards the stairwell as he moves towards the kitchen and the back door. He pauses, looking almost sorry to see her skirting away from him, holding on tightly to the banister, then leaves. She hears the back door open and close, Sal hiss one last time, and then there is silence, other than the clock on the mantle ticking, and the faucet dripping. Mae’s mouth is very dry. She never did get her drink of water. She gulps down two ice cold glassfuls, then skirts upstairs to get her wand and peer out the window with the binoculars she got for her birthday from Mum. Nothing. The street and garden are empty. She comes back down with her wand, wary now, and approaches the package on the table.

Mae doesn’t know what the point would be of him leaving behind a cursed package; he could have just hurt or killed her while he was here with her, alone, but she feels she should be careful all the same. She prods at it, but it does seem like an ordinary box. Tentatively, Mae unwraps it, and rips it open. Inside are brand new books; she can smell the newness on them, not like the old worn second hand copies she gets every year for school. They’re all the ones on the supply list for this coming year, including her Divination and Care of Magical Creatures textbooks. 

Mae cautiously lifts them out and onto the table to see what’s under them, and stares down at the soft corduroy coat underneath them. It’s Mum’s. She has no idea how he got it, and it looks like it was washed and dried, but it’s hers. Mae runs her fingertips along it, then jerks away, glancing down at her books. She shouldn’t want them. They’re tainted by him. But she’s never had brand new schoolbooks before, and there’s a packet of fresh parchment and quills, too, the multicoloured ones like Ambrose has, with their shiny iridescent feathers. 

She is still sitting up, reading her new Transfiguration book, when Mum finally comes in at a quarter to ten. Mae can tell she’s in a horrible mood from the way she closes the door. She glances up, feeling a hot flash of guilt, as Mum steps into the sitting room, looking exhausted and stressed, lips pursed together. “Who dropped that off?” she asks sharply, when she sees the box, and then glimpses her old jacket, and immediately pulls her wand.

“Mae, come away from that-,”

“He already left,” Mae says, wishing her voice did not sound quite so small. Mum is staring at her, horrified. Mae holds up her book. “He bought me so things for school.”

For a moment, her mother, who has been close to crying in front of her once, if that, to her recollection, looks as though she’s about to burst into tears, and that frightens Mae more than anything else to occur that evening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I promised we would be skipping along in terms of the timeline now, and we are. Next chapter should cover the fall of Mae's third year and the end of the 50s, so we will definitely not be spending nearly as long as we did covering Mae's first and second years, which I felt were important to establish her friend group, opinions about the school, adjusting to Hogwarts, etc. She is entering her teen years and I would say has more or less adapted to life in Britain and at school, so it's going to be less 'fish out of water' and 'childish spats' and more time spent on covering her maturing through adolescence and her evolving relationships with her mother and classmates. 
> 
> 2\. Amy's dream at the very beginning of this chapter is rooted in a real memory- that is to say, she is dreaming about an event that actually occurred in her life, a long time ago. We will hear more about it and its context in the future, but this is the same young man who Mae has seen a drawing of, and who Amy led her to believe was her birth father. Amy only knew him for a very short while but he had a profound impact on her.
> 
> 3\. The Board of Governors conveniently calling a very last minute meeting to discuss the Ministry's gathered information on Hogwarts and its education system is *such* a coincidence that it would ensure both Amy and Dumbledore are tied up with that for a few hours while Tom pays a visit! 
> 
> 4\. Mae has matured enough to be more understanding of the fact that Amy just wants to keep her safe, but is still 13 years old and loves chocolate milk, cutting the crusts off her sandwiches to eat them separately, and dancing around in her room with her cat to Buddy Holly. 
> 
> 5\. Pregnancy was seen as a very private affair in the 1950s and while people held baby showers with close family and friends and whatnot, it was considered very rude to discuss it in public or with your coworkers or random people on the street. So it's not surprising that Amy and company have no idea when June became pregnant or when exactly this baby is due. If June were a muggle teacher she would likely be expected to retire from teaching, perhaps permanently, now that she's about to have a child of her own, and before legal protections were put in place it was common to fire or refuse to hire pregnant women. While the magical world isn't free of sexism or discrimination against women in the workforce, it is a bit more progressive in that June doesn't have to fear losing her job over this, even though she hid her pregnancy for as long as possible. (The style of clothing in the 50s also probably made it a bit easier to 'disguise' a baby bump, as it was considered a major taboo to be seen going around visibly pregnant in public.)
> 
> 6\. I thought it'd be a little unrealistic for Mae to be super spunky in the face of the very scary situation she finds herself in this chapter. While Tom has told Amy he would not hurt Mae, Amy is dubious about how truthful he's being, and Mae certainly doesn't feel that her safety is guaranteed, especially when she realizes she's essentially trapped home alone with a man who is a total stranger to her. That said, Mae is still enough of her mother's daughter to immediately go for the kitchen knives when she can't escape, so there's that. 
> 
> 7\. Tom echoes his words to Amy that he said during that first confrontation at the Princes' in this chapter, and there's probably a few other parallels as well in how they react to one another. While this was by no means an 'ideal' first meeting I think Tom's impulsive decision to take this opportunity to get Mae alone is because it was the 'best' of the various not-so-great scenarios he could come up for meeting his daughter. Even temporarily spiriting Mae off somewhere isn't going to paint him in the best light to her, nor is forcing Amy to bring her to him, nor is cornering Mae in some dark corner of Diagon Alley. By meeting her in her home, I think Tom on some level genuinely thought he was being considerate of Mae's personal comfort. 
> 
> 8\. Wow, how sweet of Tom, buying Mae her school supplies and returning Amy's favorite jacket! Just kidding. And whatever went down during that Board of Governors meeting, Amy is clearly not at all happy with it. As always, you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/) if you want to discuss the fic or read my very creative roasts of Tom.


	36. Lydia VII - Mae XVI - Amy XVI

LONDON, AUGUST 1959

Lydia smooths down her embroidered flannel skirt as the lift doors open, before raising both her head and her handbag as she steps out into the busy third floor of the Ministry. She hasn’t been around since May or so, and that was just for a brief pop-in visit to Lyle at work, to make sure he wasn’t, in fact, drinking on the job as Cecily suspected. He was not, but he was tremendously hung-over. Caroline will be two in November, and there’s been not the slightest hint that Cecily might be expecting a second child. 

If she ever will. As upset as her own parents were to only have two, Lydia can only imagine the uproar her father will cause if in another decade or so it seems as though the Rosier line might end with Caroline, unless some sort of unusual marriage is negotiated in which her husband takes on their family name. Maybe another not-so-secret halfblood, like Cecily. He’d still be infuriated, and her mother too. Generations dating back to the Normans, for it to end like this. 

Lydia adjusts her neat silk blouse, tucked into her navy blue skirt with a slender silvery grey belt. Sometimes she wonders if Tom is thinking along similar lines, if he worries that though they’ve been trying for months now, nothing has come of it. Well, something might. Her monthly is nearly two weeks late, and she’s always been very, very regular, though she was a horribly late bloomer- she didn’t get her first period until she was nearly fifteen, to her mortification at the time. Tess said it might have been a side effect of her abilities but of course they couldn’t exactly consult a healer about that, could they? Her mother was petrified up until then that she might be barren, that they’d been left with just one useful child. 

She’s trying not to think much about it- there’s no sense in worrying herself sick, not when she has so many other things to attend to- but she knows she is not as excited as she should be. She ought to be thrilled at the thought. Tom will be so very pleased with her, he might even forgive her for her… antics with the Board of Governors. Well, she would not call them antics, but he would. He was not very happy with her when he picked her up after that meeting last month, only to find that while his plans to create an Office of Magical Education were proceeding as planned, Lydia had charmed Castor Mulciber, his carefully selected head of said office, into appointing her Ministry Liaison to the School. 

And why not? It’s a brand new position, it’s not as if there were any needed credentials. She is young and charismatic and beautiful and though she knows Dumbledore doesn’t trust her anymore than he would anyone in Ministry robes, Dippet, infuriated as he was over their new governmental oversight, seemed pleasantly relieved it was her he’d been spending so much time dealing with, and not of Mulciber’s cronies or one of the old hags on the Board. No doubt because he thinks she is a silly little girl in over her head, who won’t give the school much trouble and who will be easily placated with whatever schemes they have to keep the Ministry off their backs. 

Tom was not so won-over. He wanted someone handpicked by his dear Arthur Norbrook in the role, because of June, of course, but Arthur’s been awfully busy with their new baby- wretched little thing, not much nicer looking than Caroline was at that age, Lydia’s seen pictures- and Tom seems terribly annoyed about that, too. Lydia is not sure if he’s just aggravated that Arthur is something of a family man and can no longer be at his beck and call as he tends to his wife and infant son, or if something else is afoot there. Something is always afoot with Tom. At the very least, her marriage has never been dull. 

Still, he was very put-out with her over it, and told her in no uncertain terms that he would not hesitate to have her replaced if she could not keep up her ‘work’, and yes, he did all but pronounce the quotation marks- and the house and all their social calls and correspondence, everything she’s always handled for him, cards and invitations and letters and gifts and donations and dinners and knowing who is who and what event is when and laying out his clothes for him and making sure they’re on time and prepping him with a who’s who beforehand so that neither of them embarrass the other. 

Well, mostly so that she does not embarrass him. As much as the idea of her going into the office- any office- once a week seems to discomfit him, she knows he tires of having to explain things to her, that he wants her to automatically be able to keep up with what policies he is working on and whose votes he needs and when the next session of the Wizengamot is and whether anyone from the opposition party can be convinced to switch sides for the right amount of money or promotion. If anything, she’s only leveled the playing field between them. Is that so terrible?

But she knows what he was really concerned about, truly, as her having any contact with his darling Amy. Lydia is not bitter. She could not be bitter about a woman she’s met all but twice in the past two years, if that. She has no evidence that Tom is having an affair, no evidence that he is even in sporadic contact with her, and she has nothing to gain and everything to lose by bringing up his bastard child, who he had seemed content to ignore, for all that he’s obviously still hung-up on the mother. 

Lydia really cannot imagine what their last little scuffle was about, back in November. Perhaps he asked if she’d be willing to strike something up with him again, and was soundly rebuffed. That might be enough to send him on the warpath. He does not take kindly to rejection, politically or personally. 

But really, she thinks, rather crossly as she climbs a winding stairwell. He had best get himself well in hand before this becomes a liability. She’s found the receipts- well, she makes a habit of breaking into his office to comb over any receipts or bills he won’t let her see- and while school supplies are a pittance, they are also a very specific and notable gift, the sort that could potentially be traced back to him, and unlike say, a diamond necklace or perfume, people might raise their eyebrows at the Minister rather spontaneously deciding to dabble in a little school shopping! 

Lydia really does not care if he wants to play pen pals with his child. Really, she tells herself, she doesn’t. At least it’s a daughter, not a son. That would be frightfully awkward. But he needs to watch himself, for all that he is always harping on her about that sort of thing. This is political dynamite. Worse, even it is a gaping vulnerability, chink in his armor. If it gets out, that is one horrifying scandal. If one of the more disreputable parties he likes to dabble with were to find out- well, it’s not going to land in the front page papers, it’s going to be a quiet blackmailing situation for the rest of their lives.

The Office itself is still a mess, full of empty or cluttered cubicles, people darting about with boxes and rubbish bins, owls hopping about with all sorts of cross-Ministry messages, and Mulciber in the midst of an annoyed Floo call with someone in the hearth. Lydia skirts around all of them, smiling and waving politely, and slips into the small room at the end of the corridor, pausing for a moment in the doorway to trace her fingers over her name embossed in gold letters on the door. LYDIA GAUNT. It still looks odd to her, written out like. Half the time she forgets and still signs it as Lydia Rosier, prompting an exasperated sigh from Tom.

He says they’ll feel more like a family once things have settled a bit more. It’s only the second year of his term as Minister. These are still the early days. 

What Lydia has never been bold enough to reply is that she wouldn’t really know the difference. She’s not sure what a ‘family’ is supposed to feel like. Her parents are her parents, her brother is her brother. They are familiar landmarks in the winding circular route her life has taken, but she’s never felt… well, she’s never felt this strong, innate connection to them, has never felt this intense loyalty her life is supposed to revolve around. Family is everything, they’ve been telling her all her life. Family is everything. You can only trust blood. 

Lydia’s not sure she’s ever trusted anyone. Sometimes, not even herself.

She pushes the door all the way open, and just about jumps out of her skin to find her aunt peering out the window, into the artificial view of the London streets, late summer rain pattering down just as it is outside. 

“There you are, darling,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at Lydia. “I was wondering if you were coming in today.”

“You scared me,” Lydia says with the barest hint of reproach as she shuts the door firmly behind her. “Who let you in?”

“Oh, am I in restricted territory?” Therese asks mildly, then chuckles and comes over to kiss Lydia on the cheek, checking to make sure the chignon at the nape of her neck is perfect. “Don’t you look a lovely picture. Tom must be so pleased, he is a bit modern in that way, isn’t he? He’s never minded a more independent sort of woman.”

Lydia isn’t sure if Tess is being sarcastic or not, it’s always been hard to tell at times with her. “It’s only once or twice a week.”

“Yes,” says Therese, gesturing to the small desk by the window, as if she were the one working here, offering Lydia a seat. “Well, do sit down. I had stopped by over the house to see you, but of course you were off to work! Kit told me as much.” She huffs slightly. “At least Tom has agreed to let her come by more often, has he?”

Lydia presses her lips together, then admits, “I have her over most days unless I think he might stop home.”

“Lydia,” Tess tuts under her breath, as if she’d walked in on her coloring on the walls or cutting up her mother’s linens. “What have I told you about keeping secrets in a marriage?”

“It’s not hurting anyone,” Lydia says defensively, sitting down. This chair is slightly too big for her. She wipes off a layer of dust from the desk with a gloved finger, then pulls off her gloves. “Besides, you didn’t teach me nearly enough cleaning charms, and you know I always found them a hassle, anyways. It’s much easier to have Kit come by and get everything done in a jiffy. He’s much more amenable when the house is spotless and dinner is on the table.”

“Well, I could hardly anticipate you’d be marrying a man with such a contempt for help around the house,” Tess scoffs. “He’s a bit of an odd bird in that sense, isn’t he?”

Lydia bristles slightly. “He’s only a very private sort of person, is all. I’ve told you, he thinks the elves tend to talk amongst themselves, and to visitors-,”

“Well, Kit certainly did,” Therese says. “So I suppose he thought rightly.”

Lydia stiffens, mind racing. Sometimes she’s foolish and reverts to her childhood self, confessing things in an elf she’d never have dared said to her parents or brother. Kit wouldn’t repeat those sorts of things, would she? Lydia’s never considered it before. 

“She says your cycle is late, and that you’ve been out of sorts lately.” Therese wastes no time at all. “Do you think you might be with child, Lydia?”

The room suddenly feels much smaller. “I’m not sure,” Lydia says, uncomfortably. She crosses her legs under her skirt, and sits up straighter in her seat. Tess’ eyes are peering into her own, green on green. It’s almost unnerving. “I… I don’t want to jump to any conclusions-,”

“Really,” her aunt scolds. “There are tests for these sorts of things. We’re not living in medieval times where it was all guesswork, Lydia. You ought to tell Tom at once, and do one yourself, or make an appointment-,”

“No,” Lydia blurts out, feeling her face flush. “No, I- I really don’t think there’s any need for that, if it… if it’s meant to be, it will be-,”

“Don’t speak like a child,” Therese says, tone colder. “It is your duty to know. When was the last time you two had relations?”

“Aunt!”

“Well, honestly, Lydia, you are not an innocent little girl anymore,” Tess scoffs. “If he’s been doing his due diligence, you ought to do yours. Our birth rates are crumbling, and you want to sit here with your head in the clouds-,”

“I am trying to be useful!” Lydia snaps. She has not dared to do that to Therese in a very long time, but she’s right, she’s not a child anymore, and Tess- her aunt no longer dictates what she can and cannot say. She’s not a Rosier anymore, she’s a Gaunt, and she’s never been a Nott. “I am trying to make a difference, I was an integral part of this education initiative, and you might be interested to know that Tom has some thought of proposing a law mandating all magical children attend a government-sanctioned school in the future!”

She shouldn’t have said that. Tess regards her stiffly, then says, “Is that so? I had no idea Hogwarts was government-sanctioned. It’s certainly not publicly funded.”

“It is the only school for children of magical blood in Britain, so yes, the Ministry ought to have some say in what goes on there, I should think! Should have some say in how our children are raised.” Lydia swallows hard. She can’t back down now, she’ll look like a coward. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, truly, but-,”

“Yes, but now that you’re married you think you know best,” Therese cuts her off smoothly. “Of course I can’t blame you for it, but I do hope you have some mind to your own future children. Of how necessary it is that they exist, Lydia. Do you want your husband to be a spark in the pan, or do you want to build something lasting?” A shadow passes over her face. “Believe me, I pray that you and he never suffer what Antony and I did, when we were… when we were trying to conceive.”

Lydia feels a stab of guilt. “I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry. Truly, I am, Auntie. I only… I know what I’m doing. You taught me well, and I can… I can offer more than just sitting at home twiddling my thumbs waiting to see if I’m with child or not.” A sudden flash of inspiration strikes her, and she jumps to her feet. “Wait here.”

Tess looks askance as her as she darts out of the room, only to return a few moments later, laden down with a heavy manila folder. “These,” Lydia says, heaving it down onto the desk, sending up a small cloud of dust, “are the files on all the incoming students for this year. 216 of them, can you believe it? Hogwarts’ largest class in centuries. Fifty four of them muggleborn,” she adds.

Therese purses her lips together in distaste. 

“No, but that’s just it,” Lydia is quick to reassure her, though her chignon bun is coming slightly loose from her racing about in her heels. “They’ve all been assigned caseworkers, as per the new regulations, and Mulciber’s already identified thirteen of them as high risk.”

“Meaning what?” Tess asks archly, but Lydia can tell she is interested by the way she has stood as well, approaching the desk.

“Meaning their parents may be deemed unfit to raise magical children,” Lydia says eagerly. “Meaning they may be removed from their homes if we deem it necessary for their wellbeing and the preservation of the Statute of Secrecy. Now, we haven’t got any orphanages- we don’t have the population necessary for them. But we will be in need of foster homes for them, do you understand? They’d be wards of the Ministry.”

Her aunt is staring at her.

“Of course, certain magical families would get first priority, when it came to being appointed caretakers,” Lydia says, slowly, wanting to see her point made in detail. 

Tess blinks, then looks for a moment as if she might cry, her eyes unusually glassy. She half turns away, as if to collect herself. “This is viable? It’s happening?”

“Once it does, I can push you to the top of the list,” Lydia says, laying a hand on her arm. “Imagine that. You… you always wanted a child of your own.” Her tone is light, reassuring, but she feels a sudden swell of bitterness in her throat, like bile, and then a moment’s startled panic. 

What is she doing? 

But then her aunt is embracing her as she has not since Lydia’s wedding day, and Lydia melts into it for a moment. Therese was the only one who ever held her, as a child. The only one who ever- the one who seemed to care, for better or worse. Of course Lydia has her qualms about how she was raised, who wouldn’t? But this will be different. It must be different. Lydia needed special instruction. This would be an ordinary, normal child. 

Her stomach twists uncomfortably all the same, when Therese lets go, near speechless. Her aunt leaves shortly after that, seeming a little shaken, and Lydia wants to revel in her brief victory, but it soon becomes apparent that she needs to use the washroom. When she finally wrenches down her skirt and gossamer fairy silk stockings in the stall, she’s not sure whether to be relieved or disheartened by the blood. She leans her head forward in her hands, breathing in and out. 

No, this is good. It’s for the best. She is making real progress. She is having an impact. 

This is what she wanted. This is what she wanted, she reminds herself. It’s about time she started getting what she wants, as opposed to what everyone else wants for her.

HOGSMEADE, SEPTEMBER 1959

“Handsome little fellow, isn’t he?” 

Mae thinks she’s never seen an uglier baby in her life (though, granted, she’s not seen very many babies) but plasters on a polite smile anyways while she waits for the Hogwarts Express to pull into the station. She’s had to get a new uniform (well, still second hand but new enough) this year due to her growth spurt, and feels almost guilty about being in the least excited to return to school when Mum is so clearly dreading it.

Still, Mum wouldn’t want her to mope around feeling sorry for herself- she did enough of that last year, she thinks- and now that she’s a third year Mae feels… well, a little self-important. First and second years are the helpless babies of the school, with no freedom or privileges. Third years, at least, get to choose their own classes for the first time, and get to visit Hogsmeade for hours on end all weekend, no longer shepherded here and there like a flock of innocent lambs. 

So even if things are a bit of a mess, to put it lightly, on the professor side of the equation, Mae is feeling almost unusually hopeful about the new term, for once. The sensation isn’t that unwelcome. After a long, dreary summer- Mum just about had it when she heard that… well, when she heard that the Minister had come by, and Mae was on total lockdown after that- she feels lucky just to be sitting outside, though if Mum knew she was chatting with Arthur Norbrook and Professor Carmody’s baby, she’d probably have a fit. 

Mae just finds it difficult to be intimidated of a man cleaning spit-up off his infant son’s chin, is all. “There you go, Sean,” he says, with unusual tenderness when he’s done. The only fathers Mae has ever been around are Uncle Danny and Teddy with their respective children, and Marian’s father, if you count that one visit. 

She peers down dubiously at the infant once again; he’s only two months old, and just about the only interesting things he can do, according to his very invested father, are smile and roll from his tummy to his back, and over again. Neither of which he’s doing right now, in his pram. Mae has never even seen a man push a pram before, but Mr. Norbrook doesn’t seem to mind, he’s so enchanted with his baby boy. 

Mae thinks it’s a bit weird, but then again, she’s never found babies very interesting, has never even had a baby doll. Christine apparently has an entire collection of them at home. What a little freak. She probably practices scolding them, too, for when she’s an actual mother. 

“So Professor Carmody isn’t coming back, then?” Mae asks, folding her arms across her chest and straightening her black school blazer. The wind is starting to pick up, whistling down the rail line. 

“Oh, she is,” Norbrook says mildly, stroking his son’s cheek with a finger. Sean wriggles sleepily in his powder blue onesie. Infants smell weird; Mae has to stop herself from wrinkling her nose. “But not until November, I should think. She wanted to be back for the start of term, but Sean’s just too young, and I still have to go into work most days, of course, even if they’ve been kind enough to cut back my hours a bit.”

“Who’s going to watch him when you’re both working?” 

“My sister,” Norbrook doesn’t sound entirely pleased about that, but finally straightens up from cooing over his precious baby boy, straightening his hat. “It’s not ideal, of course, but few things are for we grownups. Have to make money somehow, right?” He gives her an indulgent smile, which Mae just barely returns. In the distance, the train whistle shrieks. “Well, we should get going before Sean’s deafened by all this noise. I’ll tell June you said hello, alright Mae? You’re one of her best students, from what I hear.”

Mae blushes a little to hear it, despite her cool and composed front. She knows she should be relieved that Professor Carmody is temporarily out of commission, her being a spy and probably evil and all, but she’s going to miss Dueling Club, and Defence, because whoever they get in to substitute for her’s probably going to be a real drag. Carmody might be brusque if you’re late or slack off, but her lessons are always interesting, even if she assigns far too much homework. 

She hangs back as the gleaming scarlet engine pulls in, by now knowing better than to get caught up in the middle of that crowd, and is almost astonished by the sheer number of students who come off the train. It’s got to be more than last year, much more. How many new first years could there be? Mum says this is maybe the largest class ever, but they say that every bloody year, because of the baby boom after the war(s) ended. Ambrose says his parents are all in a tizzy because it means every year there’s more and more muggleborns- as the muggle population increases, so does the rate of muggleborn witches and wizards, after all, and it’s the pureblood elite’s worst nightmare come to life. They’re terrified they’ll be outnumbered soon.

Mae doesn’t see what’s so wrong about that, then stops and thinks, frowning. She’s not a muggleborn. She’d never even considered that before. They go based off your grandparents, so even though Mum is a witch, since she comes from muggles and Amy was always taught her father was a muggle, in the eyes of the Ministry and all those snotty purebloods, that makes her muggleborn too, barely a drop of magical blood in her veins. But that’s not true. Her father isn’t a muggle. Her father is a wizard, a halfblood wizard, which means one of her grandparents was a witch, the others all muggles, which makes her a halfblood.

There’s nothing special about that, Mum says nearly half of Hogwarts’ students are halfbloods, whether their families admit it or not. But it is strange to think about. She’s a Benson on one side, a Gaunt on the other. That’s why she’s a parseltongue. She’s broken from her conflicted thoughts as a group of Slytherin boys walk by like the ponces they are, parading about as if they own the place and everyone on it. “Hey Benson, looking for some rats to catch?!” Stephen Travers jeers at her as he passes by. 

Mae makes a rude hand gesture in his direction, then calls him a really nasty name in Spanish, which she knows he can probably understand at least a bit of because all those very rich pureblood families have their children tutored in Latin before Hogwarts, so they have a leg-up on learning spells. 

“You watch your dirty muggle mouth or I’ll watch it for you!”

Ambrose shoves at him from behind, the only thing that keeps their little procession moving, shooting her a brief apologetic look. Mae just rolls her eyes. He’s her friend and she likes him well enough, but he’s a complete coward when it comes to standing up to the rest of them, so worried about being an outcast. That must be every Slytherin’s greatest fear, being chucked out of the in-group. Well, maybe not all of them, Professor Carmody was a Slytherin, and she doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of her. But a lot of them. 

Valerie jogs over to her, frowning, after that. Mae smiles; she feels a bit (well, a lot) like she was… not the best friend or roommate last year, to anyone, given… everything going on, and it’s equal (or near equal) parts guilt and fear, because if she hasn’t got any friends left, well… who else does she have but Mum? She can’t just rely on her mum forever. She’s thirteen now, she’s absolutely not a child anymore, and as much as dislikes things about Hogwarts, like the homework and the stupidly strict rules and the gossip mill, there’s enough to like that she doesn’t really want to go through the next several years… well, all alone. 

Valerie is usually very cheery to be back, but right now she seems oddly on edge. She glances after Travers and company then says, voice low and serious, “You really shouldn’t go back and forth with them like that.”

“I’m not scared of Stephen Travers and Benji Flint,” Mae snorts. “They’re just rich arseholes.”

Valerie seems unconvinced. “I’m just saying. They all like to stick together and cover for each other.”

It’s starting to rain, lightly; Mae steps under the nearest awning with her while waiting to see if she can spot Malcolm or Marian. “What’s with you? Did you get stuck with a bunch of first years on the train or something?”

“No,” says Valerie, “it’s just we’ve got this letter from the Ministry, my family. They’re assigning a caseworker soon, to interview my parents and inspect the house while I’m away at school. And then I have to meet with them before I go back home again.”

Mae frowns. “Why? What did you do?” She can’t imagine Valerie messing up enough over the summer, even if accidental magic was involved, that the Ministry would come down this hard on her. 

“I didn’t do anything,” Valerie says heatedly. “It’s just because I’m muggleborn. You’re lucky you don’t get one too.”

Mae frowns, feeling uneasy as she watches the crowds of students hurry by. “Is that really what they said?”

“Yes! It’s some new stupid initiative thing. They’re rolling it out for everyone from muggle homes coming into school or already here. My parents have to pass some kind of assessment or…” Valerie trails off, then gives an unhappy little shrug. “I don’t know. My dad was really angry about it, and my mum wouldn’t let me read the whole thing.”

“That’s not fair to just do it to to muggleborns,” Mae says. “If they want to check on everyone’s home life, they should just do that. Or make it so it only happens if you break a law, or something.”

“My parents would never break the law,” Valerie sounds horrified. “They just- they don’t really like magic, but it’s not like they’d ever treat me badly because of it!”

Their hushed conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Marian, complaining about the rain already, and Christine, who’s finally stopped wearing her hair in those two stupid pigtails. Mae decides to be the bigger person for once, since it… probably won’t kill her, and offers Christine a thin smile of truce. Christine wrinkles her nose for a moment, then gives a little wave in return, polite but curt. 

“If you’re looking for Malcolm,” Marian tells Mae, “don’t bother. He’s got a girlfriend now.”

“Who?” Mae asks, half horrified, half delighted by this news. 

“Maureen Byrd. His sister found them kissing in the loo on the train, they’re still on board, getting shouted at.”

Valerie snickers, seeming to cheer a little, and Mae smirks. “Maureen Byrd? But she’s so… shy.”

“It’s always the shy ones,” Christine interjects knowingly, and they all break into chuckles as they make a mad dash for the carriages. 

The Great Hall doesn’t look very different from years past, though the head table is notably subdued, all the professors looking some variation of stressed and/or exhausted. 

“What’s going on with them?” Marian inquires as they find their seats at the Ravenclaw table.

All nearby eyes turn to Mae, as if she’s suddenly the expert on what happens in the teacher’s lounge. It’s bad enough when people decide to give her dirty looks because her mum gave them a bad mark on a paper for Potions, or because they think she gets the answers to tests and uses them to cheat. Mae’s only ever cheated at board games and cards. And poker, because one time Mum had to go to a poker game where a duel had broken out and treat people, and had to bring Mae with her, and Mae has a very faint memory of being five or six years old and sitting in Jaime Isola’s lap while he tried to show her how to guess what hands everyone else had been dealt. 

“I don’t know,” she hedges, uncomfortable. “All I know is the Board of Governors voted to bring in the Ministry to oversee things, so they made this new Office of Education, and now everyone’s curriculum has to be approved beforehand and they get to decide who gets hired or fired from now on, it’s not just up to the Headmaster.”

“Is that why Dippet looks like he just swallowed a lemon?” Alec Carstairs mutters. 

Right then, Malcolm finally takes his seat, and is greeted by snickers and cheers, relieving Mae from the scrutiny of having to play student representative. 

The crowd of first years filing into the hall, however, is absolutely massive. Mae’s eyes widen; there has to be at least two hundred new students, all lined up waiting to be sorted.

“This is going to take all night,” Christine sighs, and for once, Mae is inclined to agree with her. 

At the very least, Mae thinks a week later, they’re no longer doing basic review in classes anymore. 

It’s not that she hates all her schoolwork, it’s just that most of it has always been very easy for her, and she doesn’t see why she should have to pay attention to teachers repeating things she already know. But at least now that they’re third years, the professors aren’t treating them with kid gloves anymore, acting like they’re liable to blow themselves up at any moment. Well, Mum still is, but that’s because she is always concerned about people blowing themselves up, in Potions. 

Still, getting to turn hedgehogs into pincushions is loads better than boring old matches into needles, and cheering charms are much more interesting than levitating feathers. The only class Mae is still really concerned about being a drag (beyond History of Magic, which even most of the Ravenclaws find excruciatingly dull, unless you’re Valerie or a few of the other muggleborns), is Defence, without Carmody there to prowl around the room barking orders at people and giving out house points for the best displays of ‘fortitude’. 

But she needn’t have worried about Defence being boring, because their substitute is Professor Romilly, who has the time to take over this class because Ancient Runes isn’t a very popular elective and only meets twice a week, anyways. That doesn’t mean the sight of Romilly up in front of the blackboard, rearranging the chalk, necessarily puts anyone in a good mood. Mae didn’t sign up for Ancient Runes and has never actually spoken to him before, but everyone knows Romilly has a reputation for having not so much a stick but an entire tree trunk up his arse, and that he’s probably going to make Carmody look like a kitten, in terms of strictness.

They were right. 

They spend the entire first two classes going over the new syllabus, which is by and large the most dull thing Mae has ever read. It’s almost entirely devoted to identifying various magical creatures that could be dangerous- what’s the point of her taking Care of Magical Creatures, if they’re just going to go over all this in this class? Unfortunately, Romilly happens to overhear her muttering as much to Malcolm, who looks similarly unimpressed, and after deducting 5 points from Ravenclaw for ‘talking out of turn’, he looks down his nose at her and declares that:

“I assure you, Miss Benson, we teachers would much rather have spent our summer holiday larking off like you students, rather than being forced to hurriedly rewrite years worth of instruction, but I’m so glad you’re here with us to give your very valuable input on the class. Perhaps you’d like to start us off by identifying the regions of Britain most prone to grindylow infestations.”

The only consolation is that she always has Care of Magical Creatures right after Defence, though to Mae’s dismay, Marian and Valerie didn’t sign up for it, and neither did Malcolm, leaving her with… Christine and a bunch of other Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. And Professor Kettleburn, who at least is always good fun, when you can understand his brogue. At least he lets everyone look at all his prosthetics whenever they want, from his hook-hand to his carved peg leg, a cruder version of Professor Witherspoon’s charmed one… except the eye patch, none of them are allowed to see what’s behind that. But he troops them out into the very border of the Forbidden Forest, which Mae still hasn’t gotten around to properly exploring (now there’s an idea), and sets them off looking for bowtruckle nests in trees and old stumps.

Or something along those lines. Mae is just relieved to be outside and in the fresh air, even if she gets forcibly paired up with Christine to search the area along a burbling brook. They manage to work in near silence for the first ten or so minutes, until Christine slips on some mossy stones and loses her footing, falling hard on her bottom into the stream, and soaking her skirt and stockings through. 

Though Mae knows it must have hurt, Christine looks so shocked and flabbergasted- she doesn’t even like to be seen with hair damp from a shower, nevermind go tramping back into the castle covered in mud- that she starts to giggle, until they both realize Melvyn Taggart is a little ways off, gawking through the trees like the little pervert he probably is as Christine struggles to her feet and starts to wring out her skirt. 

“GET LOST, TAGGART!” Mae roars at him, likely scaring any bowtruckles in the immediate area deep into hiding, but it works to send Melvyn scurrying off, worried Kettleburn might hear and impale him on his hook or something, no doubt.

“You don’t have to shout,” Christine says, as she clambers back up the muddy slope, but she doesn’t sound half as irritated as she usually does when left alone with Mae, and at least she’s not crying. Mae hates it when people cry in front of her. It’s so uncomfortable and infuriating.

Reluctantly, Mae pulls out her wand as Christine ties her blazer around her waist to try to hide her ruined skirt, and scourgifies the grime from Christine’ usually shiny black Mary Janes.

“Thanks,” Christine says, sounding surprised. Mae is a little surprised she even bothered, herself, instead of just refraining from mocking Christine to her face. 

“You’d probably get a detention or something for tracking dirt into the school, knowing Cringle,” Mae says, instead of ‘you’re welcome’.

But… well, Christine isn’t quite so obnoxious as she used to be, so far this year, although Mae thinks that might just because after two years, she’s used to it. But maybe Christine could say the same about her. 

They lapse into an awkward silence. Mae rifles through her notebook to avoid having to say anything else, flipping past a crude sketch of Night Without Stars, who she released from her… comfortable captivity a week before term started. She only tried to bite Mae once in the process, which Mae thinks she should take as a success. At least she’s big enough now that she’ll be able to look after herself in the wild without winding up getting killed by some moron like Christine’s brother. He’d probably piss his pants if he saw her now. 

“I never told on you,” Christine says, over the distant sound of birdsong and the leaves rustling in the trees.

Mae stares at her, confused. She hasn’t done anything really terribly against the rules so far this semester, but maybe she’s forgetting something, or Christine’s been spying on her.

Christine goes pink. “I mean first year. When… after you helped me get my Remembrall back. I know we didn’t really talk much last year-,”

“I wonder why,” Mae mutters.

Christine scowls, pursing her lips together, then exhales and says, “Fine. I deserved that.”

“I did you a favor,” Mae snaps, “and you threw it back in my face because you got all tetchy about your dad.” She’s aware that, coming from her, this is the height of hypocrisy, but Christine doesn’t need to know that.

She expects Christine to snap back at her, so they can settle back into their comfortable routine of grousing at each other, but instead she seems to keep ahold of her temper, and admits, “I’m sorry. You’re… you right. You helped me out and I treated you really badly.”

Mae arches an eyebrow at her. “So what? You randomly decided to feel sorry now?” If she’d known all she had to do was help Christine clean off her shoes for this to happen, she would have done that a lot sooner.

“I felt sorry last year, too, I just- I don’t know. I guess I can be… I suppose I can sometimes be sort of… not very nice,” Christine says. “I just… I’ve been really worried about my dad, because they’re promoting him to director now, and he’s always away for work, and… and my mum and him don’t always get along, so… It’s just… I want everything to be perfect at school because it’s… sometimes it’s nicer for me, than being home.” She closes her mouth very tightly after that, clearly expecting Mae to start in on her about it.

Instead Mae swallows, and says, “What does your mum do?”

“She’s a homemaker,” Christine looks askance at her. “She’s a muggle, too, so… it’s not like my dad was going to let her work, she had to look after us, and what was she going to say when people asked what her husband did?”

Probably that he kills whoever the Minister tells him to, Mae thinks, but does not say that. How can she even talk, anymore, when it comes to fathers? Her dad is the one giving Christine’s dad orders. It feels so… surreal. Christine’s father might not be a good person, but Mae’s father is the one putting him to use, isn’t he? And maybe if Mae had been… if she’d been raised by Tom Gaunt, she might defend him the same way Christine defends her father.

“How did they meet?” Mae asks, out of genuine curiosity, wondering if it was like Malcolm’s parents, where they just met one another and… fell in love. She wonders if her parents ever fell in love. Probably not. Neither of them are really the type. 

“During the war,” Christine says. “My mum was in a camp, and my dad was with the soldiers who liberated it.” She says it so casually, as if it were nothing.

Mae blinks. “I didn’t know your mum was Jewish.”

“She’s not, her family was Catholic,” says Christine. “They just started pulling people off the streets. She was walking home with her mum and sisters one day and some soldiers started cordoning off the street and they separated them. She got sent to a camp in Germany to work and she was still there when the English and the Canadians came.”

Mae does not know what to say about that. She once asked Mum if she ever went to any camps while in France, but Mum said they’d all been liberated by then, and that she was glad, because it would have taken loads more than a small group of healers to help everyone there. 

“I’m sorry,” Mae finally says. “That’s horrible.”

Christine shrugs. “That’s how they met. They don’t like to talk about it. My mum says there’s no sense in dwelling on it.”

Distantly, Mae hears Kettleburn calling for everyone to come back. 

“I’m sorry I called your mum a traitor,” Christine says. “I… I just got nervous we’d get in trouble. Or my family would get in trouble. My dad’s work is really important. He’s saved loads of people’s lives. But your mum probably has too, right? I… I didn’t tell anyone about what we heard her and Dumbledore talking about. We probably- we misheard it, right? We were just scared and we didn’t understand, but I’m sure it wasn’t anything bad, right?”

The look in her eyes is almost desperate. Mae nods. “Right,” she says. “It’s… it’s not a big deal. Christine. We were just being dumb little kids hiding in a closet. I… I’m not angry with you. Thanks for not saying anything about it to anyone. I don’t want you to get in trouble, either.”

Christine looks visibly relieved, and chances a small smile after a few moments. “You’re welcome, Mae.”

Kettleburn doesn’t give them a very good mark since they didn’t actually find any signs of bowtruckles, but for once Christine doesn’t seem to really care that she’s not top of the class, and neither does Mae. Mum would probably be proud of her for… for not letting things simmer to another blow-up fight with Christine. Mae doesn’t know how she’d feel about all the rest. 

HOGSMEADE, OCTOBER 1959

Hallowe’en falls on a Saturday this year, which means Amy has to navigate much larger than usual crowds as she makes her way through the village, even with it being a sunlit autumn day. She can smell a bonfire on the wind and the familiar scents of carmelized apples and butterbeer and whatever else they’re plying the students with, but there are relatively fewer people going around in masks than when she was a student. She knows Mae must be down here; she hasn’t missed a Hogsmeade weekend yet, not that it’s as much of a thrill for her as it is for her daughter’s classmates. 

Amy isn’t sure whether she’ll be relieved to see Mae behaving like an ordinary, carefree thirteen year old girl, walking around giggling with her friends, or worried about something happening to her in the joyous chaos of the crowds. Hogsmeade might be isolated, compared to Diagon Alley, but it’s not just students and teachers in the village, and Amy can’t account for everyone here. She’s not even sure if she can account for Hogwarts as a safe place anymore, even with Carmody still on leave. Temporarily rid of one problem only to introduce another. It’s nearly two months into the term and they’ve already had two separate visits from Castor Mulciber and his brand new Office of Magical Education.

As of right now, Amy doesn’t think anyone is in danger of losing their job, and both Dippet and Dumbledore have stressed that professors are to carry on as normal and teach as they please, save when the Ministry is paying a visit. But they are paying visits now, frequently. Amy had to fight back a scowl when Mulciber and a few cronies slunk into the back of her NEWT level Potions class, prowling around the edges of the room and asking the odd students questions here and there about what they were doing. They didn’t say much to her, but she took it for the threat it was all the same. It’s Tom throwing his weight around through his legions of proxies, as usual. They want the professors- and especially Dumbledore- on edge and wary, frightened for their jobs and more concerned with keeping their heads down and doing what they’re told, rather than taking any sort of stand. 

Amy doesn’t think Tom knows about Dumbledore’s order, thinks if he did he’d waste no time in having them all arrested on some charges of sedition or treason or whatever he could swing, but he clearly suspects something is afoot, and he clearly wants to bring the boot down on all their necks before they can get any smart ideas about using the school as a cover for their… well, rebellious activities. Maybe this is because he’s temporarily lost out on June Carmody as a spy, maybe it’s because he feels she’s not kept him well enough appraised of what’s going on and that he needs to take official action. Or maybe this has been part of his plan all along.

Because on paper, it looks good for him. The Wizengamot has been tossing around the idea of an Office of Magical Education for the past few decades now. Muggle schooling has become increasingly streamlined and overseen by the government, why not magical schooling? Britain just has the one school for witches and wizards, unlike other countries. And that school has more or less functioned independently, unfunded by the Ministry and unsanctioned by the Ministry, since the Middle Ages. 

“Minister Plans to Drag Magical Education Kicking and Screaming into the Modern Era” the Daily Prophet proclaimed two weeks ago. It’s not something anyone’s going to be quoted arguing against, is it? Hogwarts is antiquated and secretive. For too long it’s staff has more or less done whatever they pleased with the magical world’s most precious commodity, by the Ministry’s reckoning- its youth- and answered to nothing and no one. 

They’ve had great headmasters and terrible headmasters and accidents and illnesses and murders and in the earliest years of the school, when it was still a proper functioning castle and fortress, had to repel enemy attacks- and through it all, the Ministry has held its tongue and let them be so long as nothing too terrible happened, and so long as Hogwarts produced functioning adult witches and wizards who could be put to work. 

Now, though… well, now the Board of Governors has almost unanimously voted that they must, in fact, be held accountable by someone, and the current Ministry is that ‘someone’. The Ministry is setting the curriculum and the Ministry is going to have final say on who is hired or dismissed. The Ministry has the right to show up just about whenever they please, without much advance notice- they no longer have to be invited in by the Headmaster. And the Ministry has the right to come into classrooms, interrogate students, and scribbles down notes while muttering amongst themselves.

Even with a different Minister, it would cause a stir. And Amy is not stubborn enough to claim that the entire idea is awful, anymore than the entire idea of monitoring incoming muggleborn students is awful. It’s the application of it, not the concept. The application which is so clearly skewed. The likes of Castor Mulciber does not give a damn about the wellbeing of the students or updating old-fashioned lesson plans and textbooks. What he cares about is a fat paycheck and being able to dictate their lives. 

The likes of Tom does not actually care how muggleborn witches and wizards are treated by their families. What he cares about is enacting his will on them, in being able to decide who is fit to raise a child and who ought to lose that right. And funnily enough, no one’s doing much investigating of how the old pureblood families treat their increasingly small number of children! Oh, no, that would be an invasion of privacy, a disgrace! The muggles though, they’re like animals, they have to be corralled and inspected!

She manages to wipe the glower off her face by the time she’s wrenched open the door to the Hog’s Head, moving into the crowded and noisy pub. She still can’t even think about Tom breaking into their home while Mae was there alone. Anything could have happened to Mae. He could have hurt her, killed her, and Amy would have had no clue, stuck in that bloody board meeting up at the school. Her wards weren’t strong enough to keep him out. She wasn’t strong enough. What kind of mother can’t even protect her only child? 

Mae said he didn’t seem angry with her, only curious and… exasperated, almost, as if his hand had been forced to sink to this new low, but just the- the thought of him buying Mae school supplies disturbs her about as much of the thought of him buying Mae a sack of scorpions. She carefully inspected everything he purchased for her, but none of it seemed enchanted or cursed, and Dumbledore confirmed as much. 

“I expected his patience would run out, sooner or later,” he’d said instead, as if it were no great concern- he seems far more convinced Tom is no physical threat, at least, to Mae, than Amy ever has been. 

But even if he isn’t- really, she think Dumbledore was, if not pleased by the news, not disheartened or infuriated either. If anything, she’s beginning to suspect, Dumbledore thinks Mae might be… well, that Mae might be something of a possible vulnerability’s of Tom, that she could- it doesn’t even bear thinking about. He swore an Unbreakable Vow to protect her daughter. If he puts her in harm’s way, he will break it, and die. 

Maybe she should have forced a vow on Tom that night, before she left. That might have saved her a load of trouble.

She’s breathless from her brisk walk through the crowded streets and her own lingering anger by the time she slides into a booth in the back of the room across from Irene Greengrass.

There a thousand other times and places Amy would have rathered to have this meeting, but Dumbledore insisted on here and now, claimed that packed Hog’s Head was in fact more of a deterrent to potential eavesdroppers than anywhere else that might arouse suspicion, and that Irene was more likely to go unnoticed in the crowds than if someone happened to spot her say, near Amy’s home or wandering into the forest.

As it stands, while Amy can believe no one will be able to overhear their conversation in here over this din, and neither June Carmody nor Arthur Norbrook are present in the pub, which is mostly full of students chattering over lunch, she thinks Irene must have missed the memo to dress down. If that’s even possible for a Greengrass and someone who was once considered one of the most eligible pureblood girls in their year.

Irene is no less attractive at thirty two as she was at sixteen. Her sleek ash blonde hair is contained to a glossy bouffant that frames her pale, heart-shaped face pleasingly, and she is as tall and willowy and graceful as Amy remembers, from her swan-like neck to her high cheekbones to her perfectly plucked eyebrows. She sits with her emerald green trenchcoat draped around her slim shoulders, inspecting a menu, lips pursed together. Amy can’t help but feel bedraggled and worn down in comparison; she’s not even wearing a jacket, she can’t quite bring herself to put her corduroy back on.

“Professor Benson,” Irene says politely, setting down her menu. “How lovely to see you.” Her tone and the look in her grey-blue eyes is utterly unreadable. Amy supposes that’s a necessary skill for a solicitor. Or a barrister. Whichever one she is. Amy can never keep them straight. She doesn’t see what Irene needs or wants to hear from her for- she wouldn’t be surprised if Irene loathed her on principle- but Dumbledore was insistent on them meeting.

“Just Amy, please, Irene,” Amy says, then wonders if she’s already put her foot in her mouth, though she’s trying to smile. 

“Amy, then,” Irene waves over a waitress, orders an Earl Grey, no food. Amy orders a coffee, though she’d quite like a drink. She needs to be alert. 

After that, they sink into a silence that might as well be surrounded by barbed wire.

Amy feels another flare of guilt, then says, “Irene- look- I know it was a long time ago, but I just wanted to apologize, for what happened to you in our sixth year. You didn’t deserve that… to have those things said about you, and… and I know you might- I’m sorry it came out like that. And I’m sorry I didn’t say anything about it to you sooner. You deserved better.”

Irene regards her carefully for a moment, then says, “I did. But you weren’t the one who decided to air the dirty laundry, now were you? Just an innocent bystander.” She seems like she’s trying to make a brief joke, though her tone is acidic. “Look, Amy… I didn’t know you very well in school. I thought- well, I thought I knew Tom, but didn’t we all? I really… I cannot express to you how disinterested I am in whatever was going on between the two of you then. Truly. We were children. Ignorant, arrogant children. It’s not my business, and frankly, it’s really not relevant to my work at the moment. And if it hadn’t happened like that, I might not have had the push to go into law in the first place, and make something of myself. I’d just be another… Lydia Rosier Gaunt,” she suggests, with a wry smile. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’ve realized my work is my passion. Not continuing the bloodline or making the right marriage. Or any of that, really. And I’d like to keep this short, I have other clients-,”

“When did Dumbledore hire you?” Amy interrupts; she can’t help herself, though she knows she must sound like Mae.

Irene pauses, then ignores the question. “As I’d said, I’d like to keep this sort and simple.” She rummages through her patent leather dragonskin purse, a creamy shade of white in the dim lighting of the dusty pub, then pulls out a slip of paper. “I’m sure you understand. If you know of any locations that might prove of interest to a certain case involving say… documents that might be intended to never see the light of day, please write them down.” She hands Amy a fountain pen.

Amy stares at her. “You… what?”

“Well, Albus told me you’d been… exposed to a few.”

Amy continues to stare at her, utterly baffled. Irene sighs. “A location, say… you stumbled upon by accident.”

Oh. Two come to mind, though Amy’s got no idea how long of a shot this might be, or what evidence Irene already has- what is she even hoping to pin Tom with? Something she and Gilda Skeeter are working on? Is there a leak in his government? A mole? Is someone about to sell him out? 

She writes down two, though one she has no idea what the actual address is, and can only give a description of the interior of the house and some guesses as to where it might be, then pushes the slip of paper back to Irene, who inspects it with a critical air. 

“I don’t know that you’d be able to get into the first without a warrant,” Amy says, “I… they’re not going to grant a warrant, this isn’t an auror investigation-,”

“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” says Irene, sounding unconcerned as she slips the paper back into her bag. “Thank you so much for your help, Amy. Truly.”

The waitress returns with their drinks. Irene takes no more than three or four sips of hers over the next few awkward minutes, then seems ready to go. Amy feels no less confused or annoyed than she was upon walking in here.

“Can you just tell me one thing,” she says, after a moment.

Irene looks at her, a blank slate.

“Is there… is a chance this could be,” Amy says in a low voice. “This… whatever suit you’re bringing against him. You and… and Skeeter, if she’s helping you with… evidence or something. Could it… it’s not just going to be a long court battle? Could this…” She doesn’t want to come right out and say it, but she will if she has to.

“It will be a battle regardless,” Irene says coolly. “But I’m not here to pick at scabs and see where the beast bleeds, to borrow a turn of phrase from a mentor. I’m here to bury it. I wouldn’t have entertained the idea of this if I didn’t believe I could see it through to the end.”

Amy briefly allows herself to imagine that. Tom thrown out of office, possibly imprisoned, even. No longer a threat. Denounced and humiliated. 

Without thinking she says, “You really hate him, don’t you?”

Irene huffs a little chuckle at that. “It’s not personal.” 

Amy wonders if she’s echoing what Tom told her, when he unceremoniously dumped her and left her for the wolves, to be humiliated and mocked and bullied by their housemates and ‘friends’ because her father had an affair with a ‘halfbreed’ resulting in a child. 

Irene stands up. “Well, I’ve got to be on my way, but lovely chatting with you-,”

There’s some kind of commotion outside, and not just the usual shouts and laughter of students. Amy stiffens, and on instinct is out of her seat, brushing past a startled Irene, and shouldering her way through the cramped pub and out the door onto the street. To her relief it doesn’t seem to be a serious emergency, just a fight between students- Nigel Romilly and Sid have already inserted themselves between the offenders, which seems to be a group of older boys, maybe fifth or sixth years, and a few girls.

Among the boys, the only one that really stands out to her is Mick Applewhite, which makes sense, he’s always getting into brush-ups, he’s got a big mouth and likes to posture, especially in front of girls. Of the girls- Amy swears under her breath and marches over to where Mae is arguing fiercely with Sidney, flanked by Valerie Faraday, a horrified looking Christine Applewhite, and of all people, Agneza Gavran, who Amy really only knows because she’s had to give her detention twice for cutting Potions. 

“For God’s sake,” she snaps; Mae looks like she has a scrape on her hands, as if someone pushed her over in the street, and Agneza is infuriated, scarlet in the face and her hands balled into shaking fists. “What’s this about, then?”

“Just a little run-in,” Sidney says. “Mickey here had some choice words for Miss Gavran, from what I’m hearing-,”

“He and his stupid friends cornered her on the steps behind the broom shop, Mum, and they were saying all kinds of things- you ought to get thrashed until you can’t sit down for a week, you rat bastard piece of shit!” Mae shouts over Sidney’s elbow at Mick Applewhite and company, who are caught between professing their innocence to an unimpressed Romilly and shouting insults back. 

“Professor, they really were being awful,” Valerie interjects, “Mick and Danny flipped her skirt-,”

“Will you shut up?” Agneza rounds angrily on the younger girl, who shies away; Agneza is tall and slim, with truly unusual eyes, Amy sees, up close, grey-blue flecked with golden brown, almost. “I can tell it myself, I don’t need to be defended by some little third years-,”

“We were just trying to help-,”

“Well, you didn’t!”

“Professor, are you going to give Mae detention?” Mick Applewhite is calling to Amy, “she used magic off school grounds-,”

Mae’s response is to pull her wand again, only for Sidney to wrench it away from her in exasperation.

Amy turns away for a moment to collect herself, unsure whether she should be proud or dismayed that Mae is screaming obscenities in the street and now looking for pebbles to throw- proud, she decides, belatedly-

Just in time see Irene Greengrass, having come out of the pub, look disturbed between Agneza, who is still arguing with Valerie and Christine, to Mick Applewhite, the spitting image of his hit wizard father, back to Amy, then press her lips together and apparate away, easy as you please.

Amy looks back at Agneza, and realizes that they do have very similar eyes, for half-sisters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Finally, an update! As Haunt/Hunt my other multichapter fic is nearing the end, this one is on the back-burner, so it might be more like two weeks in between updates, instead of just a week, also because I am trying to do consistently longer chapters in order to cover more plot ground, like this one. 
> 
> 2\. Lydia has a part time position now, sort of, at the newly established Office of Magical Education. Neither Tom nor her dear aunt Tess are entirely thrilled about this, but Tess is somewhat appeased by Lydia dangling the prospect of... fostering muggleborn children in front of her. Many purebloods such as Therese and her husband Antony Nott have struggled to conceive. And the Ministry is now actively looking for excuses to uh... 'rehome' children from muggle homes into magical ones. While people like the Notts might be incredibly prejudiced against muggleborns, that doesn't mean they are opposed to taking in muggleborn children and more or less... shaping them in their image. 
> 
> 3\. As Lydia continues to hint at, her actual parents played a relatively small role in her upbringing, and she was primarily raised by her aunt, who she clearly has a... complicated relationship with.
> 
> 4\. June Carmody is out on maternity leave, which should be a welcome relief for Dumbledore and his fellow rebels, but Castor Mulciber keeps popping around for visits to the school, leaving everyone on edge.
> 
> 5\. Mae and Christine have both matured a bit over the last two years and have reached something of a truce after apologizing to one another. 
> 
> 6\. And Amy and Irene had a lunch date! Irene is out for blood and being frustratingly cryptic about the nature of this lawsuit she's putting together, Amy is fed up, and as has been mentioned before, Irene is momentarily face to face with her, well, half-sister, Agneza, who is the product of her father's scandal-inducing affair. Also, Mae's got a girl gang going, so that's good for her!
> 
> 7\. Next chapter should be pretty eventful in terms of werewolves, murder, and spies.


	37. Matthew V - Mae XVII - Tom VII

LONDON, DECEMBER 1959

Faint Christmas music is playing from a wireless in the next room, but Matthew has mostly tuned it out, preoccupied as he is with the maps spread across the walls next to the empty conference table. Pike is running late, which is unusual for a man who’s usually about as punctual as a watch, but he wouldn’t be shocked if Norbrook had found some excuse to waylay him in his office again. 

They’re nearly attached at the hip these days, and while Matthew has no direct proof Arthur Norbrook is up to anything nefarious, everyone knows he’s rapidly climbing the ranks, at least in the Minister’s opinion. Applewhite and Norbrook, either one of them, that’s who you go to if you want to deal with Gaunt. 

Matthew does not, as it turns out, want to deal with Gaunt, though he knows it’s inevitable, that he can’t keep his head down and skirt by forever. He knows too much to sit idle twiddling his thumbs, and he believes in Dumbledore. It’s just that it’s been a bit difficult to even attempt to bring Pike onside when it looks like Pike is being surrounded on all literal sides by cronies of Gaunt’s, and while Matthew wants to help, he is also mindful of what happened the last time he got caught up in something like this. 

Christmas last year was brutal. Evie may be more forgiving at this point, now that they’ve settled back into a ‘normal’ routine, but he can’t do anything to jeopardize her trust in him again. He even tried to tell her that Dumbledore had a plan, but she didn’t want to hear much of it. 

Her words were, if he remembers correctly, “At this rate, the less I know, the better, in case you decide to go missing again and some dirty aurors pop round the house asking questions.” She’d said it in a dry manner, but he could see the genuine anger in her eyes, and the fear. He knows she just wants him to be safe. For all of them to be safe. And the fact that he has refused to resign from the auror’s office, even when he had the perfect excuse, has not helped console her. But he feels- well, he feels some duty to see this through. 

Even if he’s not entirely sure what ‘this’ is. All he knows is that there’s this lawyer, and a reporter, and a mole. He’s not sure if the mole is in the Ministry or in the Knights of Walpurgis, but apparently there is one, and they’ve been talking quite a bit. 

For now, as the year winds down, he feels like he’s holding his breath, in more ways than one. Convince Pike that Gaunt isn’t just a run of the mill slimy politician, that he’s actually the spawn of Satan. Try to keep Norbrook and Applewhite away from Pike. Reassure Evelyn that he’s not going to be murdered, or almost murdered, or abducted by anyone. And oh, yes, there’s the matter of this increasing spate of werewolf attacks. 

Four this year, that’s more than in the past thirty years combined. Three muggles and one wizard, that’s the only reason why the Prophet isn’t in even more of an uproar over it. They don’t expect any during the winter months; people will be outside less and if there is a pack out there, they’ll have to move to follow game, a more reliable food source than humans.

The thought makes him shudder a little. Matthew turns away from the map of Britain, and glances over the map of magical Europe, dotted with glowing red push-pins, each one indicating the last known location of someone wanted by the authorities for various crimes, both during the last war and current. 

The ones that have dulled are the locations that they haven’t been able to update for years, people who have fallen off the map, maybe literally. The magical world is much smaller and closely connected than the muggle one, but it’s also easier to disguise one’s self and to travel swiftly from place to place, shaking off pursuit. 

Jaime Isola’s pin is a bright, pulsing red, near Barcelona. Last updated two months ago. Matthew stares at it for a moment, and almost considers pulling it out of the map and tossing it into the bin. 

The door swings open suddenly, and Joan strides in, along with Henry Rowle, his partner Winston Shacklebolt, and Pike himself. 

“Any updates for us, Abbott?” Rowle snorts, though he grins at Matthew, who smiles somewhat stiffly back.

To say that he was… not thrilled to wind up working alongside someone who once put him in the hospital wing when they were sixteen is an understatement, but to his credit, Rowle does seem to have changed for the better since they were boys; he even apologized to Matthew for the whole thing, seemingly sincerely, four years ago. Since then they’ve been civil with each other, even if Matthew still thinks Henry’s a bit dim and far too quick to follow orders without really thinking them through.

Then again, he could have said the same about himself, last year.

His brow furrows, but he wipes it away as he sits down at the table, Joan beside him, Rowle and Shacklebolt across from them. Pike stands at the head of it, flipping through some manila folders, looking about as tired and irritated as ever. He cuts an impressive figure, over six feet tall, broad-shouldered with a full head of grey hair, and a severe, dignified face, few wrinkles or age spots to be seen in his tawny skin, though he must be pushing sixty these days. 

He’s also notoriously private in general; all Matthew knows about Pike’s personal life is that he’s widowed and has an adult daughter. He doesn’t keep any photos or keepsakes in his office, he always wears the same sober grey suit under his royal blue auror’s robes, and he’s not what anyone would call ‘talkative’ or ‘forthcoming’, unless you’ve slacked off in front of him. 

Still, Matthew would be hard pressed to name anyone in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement who genuinely disliked Pike- they all respect him, at the very least. He’s made a decent name for himself, always handling things as fairly and neutrally as possible, refusing to grant special favors, even to his fellow Slytherin alumni. 

“Right,” he says, without much preamble. “I have all four of you in here because you’re the two teams that have responded to the werewolf attacks.”

Joan scowls; she’s been infuriated that any investigations of Virgil Mulciber’s crimes have been firmly derailed by the hysteria over the threat of werewolves running amok across Scotland and northern England. 

“The Head of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures-,”

Shacklebolt mutters something under his breath to Rowle, who snorts, before withering under Pike’s cold stare, “-Is suggesting we bring in hunters after the new year.”

“Is that why that reporter was here?” Rowle asks, before the full meaning of the statement catches up for him. “Wait. You want us to work with werewolf hunters?” His tone shifts from bored to incredulous.

Matthew is a little incredulous too. He’s only ever heard of werewolf hunters in the pages of the odd adventure novel or radio show. “Aren’t they banned under Section 5 of the-,”

“They are widely banned except in specific circumstances as permitted by the Minister of Magic,” Pike says grimly. “I don’t like the idea of it, but we’ve stalled out on this case, and if there are more attacks in the spring, people will start to panic.” He pointedly says nothing about the reporter, if there was one sniffing around. 

“Well, this is going to be a circus,” Joan says sardonically. “What’s next? We owl the Americans, as if they can ship us over some cowboys with silver bullets?”

“They’ll be here on a trial basis, if they’re here at all. In the mean time, I want radio silence on this matter.” Pike flips a page in his briefing documents. “The next thing we should discuss, while I have you four here, is the case files for the Templeton fire.”

A prominent muggleborn artificer’s entire shopfront was destroyed three weeks ago. There are already rumors cropping up that the Knights of Walpurgis was involved, though Matthew knows there won’t be so much as a whisper of it in the Daily Prophet. They know who their wealthy donors are. 

“A few seem to have been misplaced. None of you are working that case, but I am individually asking everyone in this office to be mindful about double-checking the security charms on our evidence lockers and your personal desks. Nothing should be left out overnight, and your workspaces should be kept orderly at all times, so we’re not running around like chickens with our heads cut off-,”

There’s a sharp rap at the door, interrupting him. Pike scowls, sets down his papers, and strides to it, wrenching it open, ready to ream out whoever’s on the other side. 

But it’s Arthur Norbrook, who steps in apologetically, closing the door behind him. Matthew stiffens, while everyone else cranes their necks to hear whatever he’s got to say. He’s murmuring something in a low tone to Pike, who looks incensed, then slightly less so, before nodding. Norbrook steps back out, the door shutting behind him.

“Apparently there’s something happening at the Mulciber estate,” Pike says, once Norbrook has left. “Beatrice Mulciber has sent in a complaint that her husband is missing. I want you four to over there within the hour.”

“Maybe he got lost in that labyrinth they call a garden,” Rowle snorts. 

“All four of us?” Shacklebolt is dubious, even as he gets to his feet, adjusting his robes. 

“He hasn’t been seen since last night, when he went out for a walk with the dogs. She assumed he came in later and went to bed. Woke up this morning to no sign of him. She’s worried he might have fallen and injured himself.”

Pike seems annoyed with their reluctance to leave the warm conference room and brave the wintry morning. “There’s four of you, fan out and search the property in pairs. Chances are they’ll have already found him by the time you get there.”

“This is ridiculous,” Joan says, once they’re in the coat room changing their shoes for winter boots fit for stomping around some ancient property. “What are we, private security now?”

“He’s the new Head of the Office of Magical Education,” Matthew says, “no one wants to tick him off, in case Gaunt gets wind of his little pet project being threatened.” 

He’s seen that list going around, or at least heard of. Muggleborn students currently at Hogwarts or about to begin next year, all in danger of being removed from their muggle families for one cause or another. Some of them seem valid. Visible burns or bruises or signs of neglect, houses skittering with rats or roaches. 

Others… less so. Parents uncooperative. Anti-magic bent in household. Untrustworthy siblings. Too much family in general- those who live in homes with aunts, uncles, and cousins, all considered potential risks to the Statutes via their newfound knowledge of magic. 

As far as he knows, there’s been no concrete steps to actually do anything yet, but he wonders how he would feel, in those parents shoes. To find out his child was magical, powerful beyond ordinary belief, and then to find out he might stand a serious chance of losing them, forever, unless he could prove himself cooperative or obedient enough. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

They’ve apparated over to the Mulciber estate by half past ten. The ground is mercifully dry enough, but tiny snowflakes are spiraling down from the sky. Joan burrows into her coat as Rowle and Shacklebolt stand off to one side, whispering. 

“Something you’d like to share with us?” Matthew finally asks loudly, frowning.

They glance over; Rowle reddens and shakes his head. Shacklebolt grins, revealing two dimples. “You haven’t heard? Rowle’s got a date this weekend with Pike’s daughter.”

Joan snorts; Matthew raises an eyebrow. “How did that happen? I thought she worked in the Archives.”

“I ran into her a month ago, while we were running some files down,” Rowle says, somewhat sheepishly. “We got to talking. Doreen’s really charming, you’d never guess her father-,”

There’s a distant cry; their gossip breaks off in order to see Beatrice Mulciber hurrying down the long private road towards them in a fur-lined overcoat, her sons on her heels. Linus and Tristan are twins, both a few years older than Matthew; that’s more or less all he knows about them. Both are married with young children, both seem to go to great lengths to distance themselves from their cousin. 

Luckily, Virgil doesn’t seem to be among the small group of distraught Mulcibers. Matthew thinks that’s for the best, for his sake. If he has to see Virgil Mulciber’s sneering, triumphant face out of the corner of his eye one more time, he might say something they’ll all regret. 

Beatrice is nearly incoherent in her distress, clearly genuinely horrified at the thought of her husband out there somewhere, freezing cold and wounded, but her sons are making a little more sense. 

“He went out with the dogs around nine last night,” Linus says, running a hand through his dirty blonde hair. “Heard them come back in, and the door open and shut, but now Virgil’s saying that was him coming in from a smoke, and that he didn’t see Father at all.”

“What route does your father usually take them on?” Shacklebolt asks.

“Oh, down the lane through the woods, around the lichyard and to the pond and back. It wasn’t as cold last night, just windy, so he might not have taken them so far. We’ve already went out and walked that route, no sign of him on the path.” 

“You think he was hurt and the dogs just came back without raising an alarm?” Joan asks doubtfully.

Tristan shrugs. “They were barking up a storm, but they went straight into their kennel- they’re well trained. Eventually it died down, and we never thought much of it- I could have sworn he’d come back in last night! Virgil’s back at the house with Missy and Camilla,” he adds, referring to their wives, Matthew assumes.

“Alright,” says Matthew, exhaling a puff of misty breath into the cold air. “Aurors Shacklebolt and Rowle will inspect the house and your outbuildings, just in case he slipped inside and you’ve just… missed him. Auror Harker and I will patrol the grounds. If he still has his wand on him, even if he can’t walk, he should have been able to cast a simple warming charm or two to keep himself safe tonight. Let’s not panic anymore, alright?”

Beatrice Mulciber is busy crying into Linus’ coat; he awkwardly pats his mother’s back and nods at the same time.

Shacklebolt and Rowle have no complaints about getting to go inside.

“What do you reckon?” he asks Joan once they’re firmly or alone, the Mulcibers escorted back inside, the quiet gravel lane ahead almost peaceful, with birds chirping in the grey trees and snow still gently spiraling down.

“I don’t know,” says Joan. “But what I do know is that I don’t like this.”

“You think they might be lying?”

“I don’t know,” she says, insistently. “It’s just… something feels off. He goes out to walk their dogs that late at night, in winter?”

Matthew frowns, keeping his eyes peeled and his wand out as they proceed, looking for any faint signs of a struggle along the road and the underbrush; broken branches, footprints, scuff marks in the mud and dirt. “It’s odd. But none of them seemed to think much of it.”

They lapse back into silence after that; alert and watchful of any sudden movements among the trees. A crow caws nearby as the lonesome family lichyard comes into view, a small graveyard that probably dates back to the Middle Ages, if not even earlier. The low stone borders are crumbling and the gate has rotted off entirely. 

“Dog tracks,” he says, gesturing with his wand. They enter.

“Mr. Mulciber, are you here?” Joan calls out, then shoots of a shower of sparks into the air with her wand. They glow purple before dissipating. There’s no sound but the wind.

Matthew glances around the crumbling tombstones and withered shrubbery. There is one small crypt. His stomach clenches, but he tells himself he’s been in far more dangerous locations than a tomb. “We should check it out. Just in case he stumbled inside, or something.”

The door is slightly ajar; it’s unclear if the wind opened it or not. They both pause outside, and then Joan raises her wand, and says clearly, “Lumos maxima!” A blast of light ricochets into the cramped stone interior, revealing nothing but dust, lichen, and dead flowers and leaves. Matthew steps inside, as Joan loops around the back of the building. 

There’s various names engraved into the wall, at the foot of their respective interred remains. The latest two are from the 30s and 40s. Jerome Mulciber, born 1895, died 1932. Castor Mulciber’s elder brother, and Virgil’s father. Augusta Flint Mulciber, born 1904, died 1944. His wife. Matthew can’t imagine what it must have been like to lose both parents before the age of seventeen. Virgil would have had his uncle and aunt to look after him, but it must have been crushing. 

Then he pauses. Is he honestly feeling sympathy for the likes of him? 

There’s a muffled explosion of noise from outside, sounds of a struggle. 

Matthew dashes back out into the sunlight, heart pounding, only to come face to face with Joan, who thankfully seems unharmed, though her wand is trained on none other than Virgil Mulciber, who kneels between two headstones, hands raised in furious surrender.

“Get his fucking wand,” Joan snaps at Matthew, who spots it lying in the leaves and summons it to his left hand immediately. “Do not move,” she barks at Mulciber. His face is thunderous, but he obeys. 

Matthew stares at her. “What’s this about? Did you see him-,”

“Take a look in the well,” she snaps. “Right behind the crypt.”

“Did he-,”

“Just look! I’ve got him!”

Mulciber is silent; no snide retorts, or even desperate excuses. 

Matthew slowly paces backwards, keeping his eyes on both of them, until he is standing beside the small brick well. He glances down, briefly, then blanches. The cold, dry air is muffling the smell, but the vague outline of a corpse is unmistakable in the morning light. 

“There’s more underneath,” Joan calls to him, tone hard as ice. 

Matthew forces himself to look down again, illuminating the hole with his wand light. He sees a woman’s shoe, and a skeletal arm. On top of… however many are down there, lies Castor Mulciver, eyes wide and horrified at the moment of death, face frozen in contorted fear, a telltale sign of the Killing Curse. 

Matthew feels bile rise up in his throat, then swallows. It’s not the first or last corpse he’s seen. He walks quickly back over to Joan and Mulciber, who still has said not a single word. He looks as though he never changed out of his clothes from the night before; they’re rumpled and worn. Tellingly, his trousers are soaked through up to the knee, his shoes coated in muck and grime.

“I have a look down there,” Joan says, “and next thing I see is him staring up at me. Thought you’d beat us to your little stash, is that it?” she snaps at Mulciber. “What were you planning on doing, incinerating them?”

His eyes are narrowed in hate, but he remains silent. Probably the wisest move, Matthew thinks, pragmatically speaking. Anything he says right now will only incriminate him further. 

“Do you want to do it, or me?” he asks Joan.

She swallows, hard, throat bobbing underneath her blue scarf, then steps forward, wand still trained on Mulciber, pulling a pair of rune-engraved handcuffs from her belt. 

“Virgil Mulciber, you are being arrested under suspicion of the murder of Castor Mulciber. You do not have to speak. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.” He stiffens when she forces his hands behind his back and cuffs them together, but doesn’t fight her, standing up of his own accord, nearly a head taller than Joan. 

Matthew feels a deep swell of anger and triumph intermingled in the pit of his stomach. Finally. Finally. What did it take? His uncle? After all those innocent muggles? It took his uncle, for this all to come falling down around his ears? He wonders if Castor finally confronted his nephew about it, if that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Mulciber simply snapped and lost control. “You can walk out of here,” he says, “or we can stun you and carry you out. Your choice, Virgil.”

Mulciber elects to slowly stand and walk, leaves crunching underfoot. Matthew and Joan both flank him, all the way out of the lichyard, as the wind continues to moan through the trees, and the birds continue to chirp cheerily.

HOGWARTS, DECEMBER 1959

Mae is sitting in the back corner of the room, carving her initials into the underside of the desk with a knife, when there’s something of an uproar outside, and everyone was still putzing around in the corridor comes hurrying in to take their seats. Mae looks up, wondering what everyone is so excited about, only to see not a scowling Professor Romilly sweep into the room to begin another excruciatingly slow lesson, but Carmody herself. 

She’s grown her auburn hair out and looks a little older and tireder, to Mae’s eyes, but she’s dressed as fashionably as ever, a scarf knotted around her throat above her turquoise silk blouse, and her dark blue pencil skirt is lacking so much as a wrinkle. Marian slides into the seat next to Mae, looking thrilled that Carmody is back, as is most of the class. Even if she gave them loads of homework last year, and always embarrassed whoever she caught chattering in class. 

Well, absence does make the heart grow fonder, and Mae would be lying if she said she wasn’t a little relieved, because this means Dueling Club must be starting back up next term, after none of the professors were willing to take it over in Carmody’s place. The room quiets as she puts her bag down on the desk, then smooths down her skirt, clapping her hands together sharply. 

“Right then,” Carmody says, without any explanation or reasoning as to why she chose to come back when there’s only two and a half weeks of classes left before the break. “I’ve looked over what you’ve done with Professor Romilly-,”

“Busy work!” someone dares to call out, with a few nervous giggles following.

Carmody glances around, then says, “I’ll be sure to forward that feedback to him, Mr. Amory.”

“I was only kidding, Professor!”

“Good to know she’s still got no sense of humor,” Mae mutters to Marian, who shushes her, annoyingly. 

“And I have also examined the new curriculum set by the Office of Magical Education,” Carmody continues smoothly. She pauses, then allows a slight, sly smile. “I’ve elected to ignore it whenever possible-,”

Muffled cheers and applause from her shocked third years.

“And as it is my first day back, I’ve a treat for you all.” Carmody drags something out from under her desk; a trunk of some sort, not any bigger than the one most students use to keep their luggage in, though it can’t have much in it, from the way she easily yanks it across the floor. 

Carmody perches on the trunk lightly, one leg crossed over the other, high-heeled foot dangling. The soles of her shoes are blood red. Alec Carstairs is staring openly at her legs; Mae supposes Carmody having a baby hasn’t put him off much. She is still quite pretty, though Mae doesn’t see why that should be surprising. She thinks her mum is more or less just as nice looking as she was before having Mae, though she had a baby a lot younger than Carmody did. 

“Can anyone,” Carmody says, “tell me what a boggart is?”

Christine and Maureen Byrd’s hands shoot up at the same time, but when Malcolm smirks at Maureen she gets flustered and lowers her hand, self conscious, so Carmody calls on Christine instead.

Mae thinks someone is getting a little too big for his britches now that he has a ‘girlfriend’- and she will only say it in quotation marks because according to her mum, both her aunts, and Valerie, who is more up on these kind of things because wizards didn’t even start dating until relatively recently in history- girlfriends and boyfriends don’t count as real until you are least fourteen. 

“What are you doing to the desk?” Marian whispers to her, as Christine continues her long-winded explanation of what a boggart is. Everyone from a magical family knows this already, or they should. Shapeshifting spirit that preys on fear. Pretty straightforward. Every single magical culture has some version of that. 

Mae shows Marian the small, cheaply constructed pocket knife she’s been using; it’s tiny, not much bigger than the length of her longest finger. “Agneza gave it to me,” she says. “After that time in Hogsmeade.” Just thinking about it still annoys her. Not Agneza, but Christine’s brother and his stupid friends. When she saw what they were doing she’d felt a red hot sear of anger up the back of her spine, as if she’d just received an electric shock. All the blood had rushed to her head and she swears she red for an instant, just a millisecond. 

“Why would she give you a knife?” Marian sounds less impressed and more scandalized.

“I think it’s cool,” Mae hisses back. Agneza is cool. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks and her hair is almost silvery in the sunlight and she has gold flecks in her pale blue eyes. Plus she says she has loads of knives because she likes to do wood carvings and she’s going to be an artist and make magical masks that can give people different abilities. Mae is pretty sure that’s the coolest thing she’s ever heard. 

“You’re alright, Benson,” she’d said, smiling at Mae to reveal perfect, gleaming teeth.

“If a teacher catches you with that-,”

Marian’s scolding is interrupted by Carmody unlocking the trunk. A startled hush falls over the class, and Christine, flushed bright pink in triumph as she always is after getting an answer right in class, shifts uncomfortably in her seat. 

A wisp of smoke billows out, then larger and thicker, before materializing into a crooked, almost cartoonish, flickering street lamp, like one you’d find on a corner. It’s not exactly terrifying, but something about its towering proportions and spindly frame is unnerving, unnatural, and the light it casts is harsh and disorienting. 

June Carmody stares up into it, unflinching, then snaps, “Riddikulus!” A crack like a whip- or the sound of apparition- breaks out, causing several people to jump and flinch.

The street light shifts into a drooping scarecrow, which might actually be even more scary, if not for the smattering of uncertain laughter from the class, which reduces it to a swirling vortex. 

“Professor,” someone is saying, “I thought we weren’t allowed to interact with magical creatures ranked higher than-,”

Carmody leans against the blackboard. “Who’s next?”

Chairs scrape back after an awkward moment; no one wants to look like a coward.

Carmody walks up and down their makeshift line, demonstrating the correct form the spell. “You need to recognize your fear and move past it,” she says. “Find something humorous in it. There’s nothing a boggart dreads more than laughter.”

About half of the class looks excited and eager to prove themselves, the other half all but shaking in their boots. Mae varies somewhere in the middle; at least it’s not bookwork, and it is funny to see what everyone’s so afraid of. 

For the most part, it is a parade of familiar, palatable fears, recognizable from films and fairy tales and everyday life. Ogres and snakes and mummies and aliens, spiders and shadows and sharks. All cheap replications, looking more like wax figurines than real life while the boggart tries to determine how they should move and react, the class shrieking with excited squeals of laughter. 

Mae shuffles ever closer to the front of the line, behind Malcolm, when it hits her. 

What if it turns into him?

Before this year (or last year), if you’d asked her what her worst fear was, it’d have been something silly, and childish, like the monster of whatever latest flick she’d watched, or some half-remembered story from childhood. A trick of the light, a long shadow, a creaking door, something mundane that unnerved her beyond reason. 

But what if- how is she going to explain it if the boggart turns into the Minister of Magic? What if it talks, as him? What if it says something?

Suddenly her stomach turns to jelly, and she glances around, trying to see if she can slip out of line unnoticed, but everyone’s watching, including Carmody.

Running out of options, Mae rolls her wand between her fingers, trying to think. There has to be some excuse she can use. What if she was sick? But somehow she doesn’t think a sudden coughing fit is going to work on Carmody. 

Mae bites her lip as Malcolm steps forward, and then it hits her, just as the boggart turns into a teeming mass of writhing maggots and worms, prompting shouts of disgust from the class. 

Mae turns as if she has to sneeze, brings her hands to her face, and jams her wand between her teeth, muttering a water conjuring charm.

Her mouth fills up, and as Malcolm tries to vanquish the boggart, Mae steps out of line, doubles over, and spews liquid across the floor.

There’s a chorus of gasps and exclamations, and she knows she’s not going to live down ‘vomiting’ in front of the class for the rest of the year, but better that than not being able to live down everyone knowing she’s Tom Gaunt’s daughter, right?

Carmody has Valerie walk her to the infirmary, by which point Mae has made a miraculous recovery, but Amell is shut up in her office with someone, so Valerie leaves Mae to sit on a cot close to the door, then jogs back to class, looking a little green around the gills herself as the thought of seeing anymore sick. 

Mae feels a little guilty just sitting here, since she sort of blew off her volunteer work in the infirmary after getting what she needed from Amell, but luckily she had the excuse of her electives taking up too much of her time this year, and Amell didn’t seem very put out about it. Probably because Mae spent more time snooping around and pretending to look busy than doing any actual labor. 

For now, she sits cross-legged on the cot, figuring she’ll just wait until Amell looks her over, take a nap, and go to her Charms no worse for the wear.

But it’s improving impossible not to pick up any of the conversation through the office door just a few feet away. For once in her life, Mae isn’t actually trying to eavesdrop, but it’s blatantly obvious that Amell isn’t talking to a teacher, but to a student, a girl, who sounds very upset over something. After a few frustrating minutes, Mae gets off the cot and paces closer to the door. The girl speaking sounds oddly familiar, though she’s not sure who it is.

“-I heard you could always get these sort of things-,”

“I’m afraid that’s just not possible anymore,” Madam Amell is saying, sympathetically but firmly. “The school is under a good deal of pressure at the moment, and it’s just not the sort of thing we need circulated-,”

“But how am I supposed to-,”

Bells start to toll and chime all over the castle, indicating a new hour and a change in classes. Mae scoots back to the cot and sits back down, just as Madam Amell’s door swings open. She steps out, escorting Eileen Prince, to Mae’s surprise. 

Eileen’s a seventh year, and supposedly taking as many classes as possible; what’s she doing down here? She doesn’t look sick or injured, just a little flustered, even more so at the sight of Mae, who she clearly recognizes. Eileen steps off to the side stiffly, tucking a stray lock of dark hair behind her ears as Amell turns to Mae.

Mae explains her plight, and Amell looks her over critically, and then sends her into the lavatory with a cup of water to wash her mouth out. When Mae returns a minute later, Eileen is still standing there, looking a little more composed but still displeased and embarrassed about whatever she wanted from Amell. Mae wonders what it could be. Some sort of potion or medicine? But why would she need special permission to take it?

“Miss Prince will see you to your next class, if you’re feeling alright,” Amell says, sounding dubious about Mae ever being ill in the first place.

“I just really hate maggots,” Mae says, smiling queasily to indicate this, but there’s a clatter at the window inside Amell’s office, and she goes back in to answer the owl tapping at it. 

As Eileen and Mae leave the infirmary, Professor Penvenen goes hurrying by on the heels of Professor Finch, and Mae looks around in confusion to see some other teachers gossiping in a doorway, heads bent together.

“What’s going on?” she asks Eileen, who shrugs sullenly.

“Girls!” Professor Carmody is there, to Mae’s dread, striding over, but she doesn’t look suspiciously at Mae, only pulls Eileen aside and tells her something in a low, serious tone, then lets her and Mae keep walking.

Eileen looks startled for a moment, then presses her thin lips together, wiping the look off her face.

“What’s going on?” Mae presses.

Eileen sighs. “Carmody just told me not to tell anyone before the Heads of House announce it.”

Mae senses an undercurrent of rebellion there, though she’s unsure if Eileen’s actually going to go through with this or not. So far she just dresses like a rebel, she doesn’t actually… do anything rebellious, to Mae’s knowledge. 

They round a corner, coming into a deserted corridor. “Look,” says Eileen. “You’ll probably hear about it from your mum first anyways. There’s been a murder.”

Mae feels the hair on her arms stand up. “One of the teachers is dead?” she blurts out, wondering wildly for a moment if Carmody killed Professor Romilly to get her job back. Only he was at breakfast this morning looking as grumpy as ever, so-

“No,” Eileen says, as if she’s being stupid, wrinkling her nose. “Mr. Mulciber is. The Head of the DOME.”

Mae stares at her, putting the pieces together in her head. “What- what happened to him?” She hates him on principle, although she’s never actually talked to him, just seen him lurking around the school taking notes with his cronies.

Eileen shrugs, seeming to take, for a moment, some sick pleasure in being so flippant over someone she must know. Her parents are trying to get in with the Sacred 28, they must have met the Mulcibers before. “They found him dead at his house, and it looks like murder.”

Mae is silent for a moment, then says, feeling like she ought to take advantage of Eileen’s sudden forthcomingness, “So what were you asking Madam Amell about, in there?”

Eileen’s long, pale face shutters instantly, like a window being slammed shut to keep out the light. “You’re a very nosy little girl,” Eileen says, coldly, drawing herself up like one of those haughty pureblood girls who make fun of Eileen for being too tall and too plain and too awkward. “And you ought to be in Charms, not asking silly questions.”

Mae scowls at her, but isn’t willing to risk a possible detention right now, not for something as stupid as this. “I thought that was the whole point of being a Ravenclaw, asking questions,” she snipes, as Eileen stalks off. “My mistake!”

“Go to class, Benson!”

Mae goes, stomping over to the nearest stairwell and flicking her pocket knife open and shut in her hand all the way up them to calm herself down. 

YORKSHIRE, DECEMBER 1959

Funerals are a relatively rare experience in Tom’s life thus far. Wizards and witches live longer than muggles, regularly eking out a withered and wizened existence past one hundred with all their faculties intact. While disease and accidents still happen, he’s seen very few in his extended social circle laid to rest. 

He has a distinct memory of one of the infants at Wool’s dying in the night when he was four or five, and being hastily taken away the next morning, a small bundle wrapped in a blanket and placed in a wicker basket. Some common muggle illness, he supposes. They’re very fragile. 

As for his family’s funeral, well, he watched that from afar, then paid a visit to the graves that night, waiting for a flare of regret or even shame that never came. He’s never been back there again. What would be the point? They did not even realize what was happening to them as they died. Their last sensations were alarm and shock. He didn’t spare a second glance for the old man or his wife, but he did stand over his father’s corpse for a little longer, examining the face with mild curiosity, as one might an uncanny wax figurine of a celebrity or historical figure.

He supposes he was fortunate in that sense, to have gotten a glimpse of how he might look in another twenty years. The resemblance really was quite striking, though Tom Riddle was prematurely aged in ways Tom Gaunt never will be, bloodshot eyes and a lined, slightly swollen face. All the drink, Tom assumes. He reeked of it even during the daylight hours. He would like to think it was guilt that compelled him to drink, guilt over abandoning his wife and son. Tom might have forgiven him had he ever even considered returning to claim his only child. 

But he didn’t.

Tom is not his father. He will never be his father, he reminds himself, as he stands among the crowd of wealthy mourners, all draped in black robes, many of the women in Victorian style veils, watching Castor Mulciber’s casket being sealed shut. They’ll have to keep it somewhere else until the lichyard is no longer considered a crime scene. Who knows how long that might be. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement in a gleefully rabid frenzy at the thought of finally having pinned down Virgil. 

It’s just as well. Life imprisonment saves Tom from the bother of having to kill Virgil himself. And it neatly wraps up the rest of those awkward rumors about Virgil being a card-carrying member of the Knights of Walpurgis. Frankly, Tom wanted to put his foot down about that, but most of the families were not having it. Certain tendencies aside, Virgil was a cherished firstborn son, heir to the Mulciber estate, and his father had been quite popular before his own untimely death. There were some whispers at the time that Castor himself might have had something to do with that, but those were all neatly swept under the rug, of course.

Honestly, managing all their respective egos and prides is exhausting. Image is everything to the sacred twenty eight, to the point where it often blinds them to the necessity of doing what must be done. They’ve all got blind spots when it comes to their wives, their husbands, their children, their families. Tom can’t imagine what it must be like to stumble through life so… willingly blinkered.

_I don’t believe you._

He can still see her quite vividly in his mind’s eye, that small sullen face and those wide blue eyes trained on the floorboards so she would not have to look at him. She sounded so much like her mother when she was angry, he was not sure whether to be bemused or aggravated. But she was- he supposes, when he’d pictured her, even after seeing photographs and hearing second-hand accounts of her personality and habits- it was not the same as seeing her in the flesh, as being, for the first time in either of their lives, in the same room as his own child.

It could have gone worse, he has been telling himself since July. She was angry and hostile and frightened, yes, but that was to be expected. He’s coming up against a good decade of Amy’s poison, and it might take just as long to dredge it all out of Mae. At the very least, she was curious. Perhaps it’s for the best she was sorted into Ravenclaw, after all. He can work with curiosity, with reluctant intrigue, even if it’s tempered by fear and suspicion. 

At the very least, she has some sort of hunger for knowledge, to learn, to know things. She did not break down and cry for her mother, nor did she trust in him blindly, something that might have been even more unsettling. And aside from her little attempt with the knife, she wasn’t violent to the point of him having to subdue her himself, either. 

Even if she thinks she hates him, she knows she doesn’t know him. And that is something. He can use that. If their brief meeting made anything clear, it was that he needs to change tactics. Amy is regrettably forthcoming with the girl. He can’t keep up the same patterns of threats and intimidation and expect it not to trickle back to Mae. For the time being, he needs to relax. He’s never been more powerful in the Wizengamot, there is no serious resistance to any of his reforms being slowly but steadily enacted, and Amy and Mae are closer than they’ve ever been to him. 

What was the saying? You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar? He doesn’t think Amy’s had all the vinegar from him that she quite deserves, but he has to accept that it is no longer just about Amy. Mae is a complicating factor. Of course he doesn’t love her, anymore than he still loves Amy, but he- he is her father, and she is his responsibility, welcome or not. 

He won’t be like his father. He won’t abandon his child. He doesn’t expect he might ever love her the way most men presumably love and cherish their daughters, but he already feels a material fondness for her, like a song you hear once that lingers in your head for weeks afterwards. 

She’s intelligent, and resourceful, and bold. None of that was a disappointment to him. The fact that she does favor his looks, readily apparent when he was in the same space as her, does not hurt his approval of her, he will vainly admit. A miniature Amy might have been a good deal more vexing. She challenged him. A tiny little girl, utterly defenceless, shaking in her boots, still stared him down angrily, even threatened him. He tries to imagine her as a young woman, that same icy look of contempt on her thin face, blue eyes blazing with fury. 

Tom’s never felt pride in anyone but himself before, and so is reluctant to name this.

As the crowd around the sealed casket begins to disperse, a high pitched wail begins. Tom at first takes it for Mulciber’s hysterical widow, then realizes it’s an infant. June Carmody steps away from the group, pushing the pram containing her infant son, and after a hushed argument with her husband, disappears into the frosty hedgerows of the grey-toned garden. Unlike the Rosiers, the Mulciber did not enchant their plants to flower through winter. And it might have made for a somewhat awkward funeral, to be surrounded by bright colors and sweet smells. 

Tom watches June’s figure disappear into the shrubbery, then glances over to where Lydia is locked into conversation with her aunt and uncle, their heads bent together soberly. The birdcage veil of her black hat shadows her face from him, and he studies her for a moment before looking away. She’s been subdued all this week, likely wary that he would take this as an opportunity to insist she give up any silly notion of work for the DOME. 

But it’s just as well, he’s decided. He’d rather she be preoccupied with something than have too much free time on her hands. She hasn’t so much as breathed a word to him about Amy or Mae, but he knows they’ll have to discuss it at some point. He needs to be very clear about where she stands relative to all this. Besides, he’s just named her uncle as Mulciber’s replacement, so she can hardly complain he’s been neglecting her and hers. 

He moves over to the Mulcibers to express his sorrow one more time, even offering a small sad smile to the sniffling grandchildren, who are obviously more upset by the tension and grief emanating from their parents than they are about their grandfather’s death. They’re lucky to have gotten a decent turn out for this funeral. As soon as Virgil’s trial starts, it’s all going to go downhill for them. Rumors were one thing. Open confirmation- public record- that a prized scion of a pureblooded family was conducting himself like a common killer is another. 

Still, it wouldn’t do to shun them completely.

And he’s not entirely convinced- though prepared to publicly accept it, for everyone’s sakes- that Castor was, in fact, murdered by his nephew. Certainly, Tom had… strenuously encouraged him to take Virgil to task, but for Virgil to react so wildly when he could have brushed off his uncle with little effort, knowing the threat of shame and ostracization would keep the old man in line. Of course, Virgil was never what Tom would call the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he’s not a complete lackwitted brute, either. 

He hopes it was Virgil. He wants it to have been Virgil, open and shut. 

But it stands to reason that plenty of people at Hogwarts had good reason to want Mulciber out of the picture, and Tom’s had access to all sorts of interesting intelligence documents since he took office, many of which are from the war. And a shocking number of those are devoted to trying to piece together Grindelwald’s rise to power, and how, in his youth, he spent a good deal of time tooling around Europe, attending conferences and galas and courting the best and brightest, among them one Albus Dumbledore. 

So it stands to reason, Tom thinks, that’s underestimated the old fool all these years, and that Dumbledore has, all along, been willing to roll up those sleeves and get his hands a little dirtier than his gleaming reputation as a war hero and genius warlock might suggest. 

Could he have killed Castor himself? He’d certainly be capable of it, and of evading any suspicion. Could he have pawned it off on someone else? Equally likely, in Tom’s estimation. That way, if there were any complications, they could take the fall. Dumbledore’s always been able to inspire that degree of insipid loyalty, while making it out to be one noble fight for the greater good. 

It doesn’t take Tom long to catch up with June, whose pace slows as she hears footsteps behind her. She turns, her auburn hair tucked under a black cloche hat with a scarlet feather across the fuzzy brim, which emphasis the stark paleness of her face, aside from her red lips. Just like her to not tone down her style of dress, even for a funeral. 

Tom is passing fond of June, and finds it easier to shift blame for the unexpected pregnancy onto Arthur, who is really a bit old to be a first time father, and this prophecy nonsense…

There is no way they could have heard about it, he reminds himself.

_The rest of the prophecy seems to explicitly to refer to a possible child, born in the July of this year, who will bring about, through some means, the death of this leader. ‘Of his own covenant’ might suggest that the child’s parents will be those the man might consider to be friends or allies._

“June,” he says, as she comes to a halt, adjusting the covering of the pram. He catches a glimpse of a slumbering infant’s peaceful face, a cheery green and white cap on its head. 

Sean Carmody Norbrook, born July 24th, 1959, around seven o’clock in the evening. 

An infant, he reminds himself, is not a threat. June and Arthur are loyal. He has regular access to June’s memories. But it is possible that even inadvertently… well, children grow up to disagree with their parent’s views all the time. Still, he gains nothing by acting too rashly. But the uneasy sensation he feels, looking down at the black pram, is hard to shake.

“It was a lovely service,” June says, drawing him out of his thoughts.

“It was,” Tom agrees. He inspects her expression; she looks tired, worn down from her recent return to teaching, but there is no hint of anxiety or nerves in her eyes or posture. “And how is motherhood treating you?”

“Alright,” she says, more casually than most would speak around him, but he is willing to tolerate it due to her record of very efficient competency. He knows many other Knights are uncomfortable with her membership, think it overly indulgent of him, especially when it’s well-known she was sired by a muggle father, but Tom, perhaps, thinks there’s a certain kinship there, unspoken, of course, between him and her. They both hate their fathers, loathe what their mothers became, both have high aspirations to a brighter future. “Glad to be out of the house, though. Even for something like this.”

“And teaching,” he says, “how has that been, settling back in?”

She casts an almost amused glance up at him. “Would you like to take a look?”

He decides to take her up on it. Legilimency is far from an exact science. He is one of the best he knows of, but there is never a guarantee that he will see what he wants, that it will be easy to sort through the clutter of someone else’s mind, every thought, impulse, and memory. Still, June has a neater sort of head than most, compartmentalized, really, and practice makes perfect. It’s certainly easier when it’s not a struggle, a forced entry. She holds her gloved hand up to him, palm up. It’s not necessary to make physical contact, but he finds it often grounds him, only he usually has little desire to lay hands on whatever filth he’s interrogating.

Tom takes her hand, and pushes open the door she left unlocked for him.

Images swarm out of the mist at him. Most, annoying, concern her personal life, what people tend to fixate the most on. Arthur smiling at her across the dinner table, the smell of food, the feeling of relaxing back into a sofa. Bedsheets rustle, water runs from a faucet, shoes clack across the floor. A baby cries, a bottle is administered. Her son smiles toothlessly up at her, nestled against her chest. He feels her flood of affection with her; it’s vaguely uncomfortable, unnatural for him to be carried along on this wave of sensation. A cradle rocks, someone is singing a lullaby, English shifting into Gaelic and back again. 

He makes his way through them, into the more relevant matters, wants to cough on the chalk dust he smells. Rows and rows of students, hundreds of them, filtering in an out throughout the day. Cups of tea and coffee, stacks of papers waiting to be marked, mundane mishaps and arguments and children crying and shouting or averting their eyes in shame at being scolded. He pauses, watching Eileen Prince linger in the doorway to ask about the DADA NEWT, feels June’s mixture of exasperation and fondness with her- she could be so much more, they think, together, in unison, one voice. 

He sees Mae more than once, but doesn’t allow himself to stop for long, leery June might be able to sense this, wonder why she is suddenly thinking of Amy Benson’s daughter. He watches the boggart, sees his daughter escorted out of class sick. They didn’t learn with a live boggart when he was a student, but he would have done much the same, faked illness to avoid being exposed like that in front of everyone. It’s only wise, to want to avoid sharing weakness in front of your peers. Only human.

Other professors- Amy- Amy- he pushes past that, too, Amy’s watchful stares, the slight frown playing on her lips from the opposite side of the teacher’s lounge, where she sits next to Sidney Finch and Iris Penvenen at a card table, looking over some papers. He can smell her tea, chamomile, she always liked that blend best. Then Dippet and Dumbledore, grousing over the new curriculum, Dumbledore’s keen blue eyes seeming to pierce through June, even as he congratulates her on the birth of her son.

“I’m sure,” he says, “that Sean will grow up to be every bit as determined and successful as his mother.” 

Feels June’s flare of displeasure, annoyance, with her- he’s already better than you, he’s better than all of this, she thinks, and Tom thinks it for a moment himself, too, my son deserves a different world, a new world, one where he never has to be afraid of himself, of his power. 

And then they are back to the child. She thinks briefly of her childbirth, and he feels pain, too much pain, and hastily retreats from her head entirely.

June blinks and exhales as he releases her hand.

“This may work out better,” he says. “Tony Nott running things now. You two have a good rapport, and he’s more personable than Mulciber.”

“Didn’t Slughorn have his hat in the ring?” she asks, with a wry edge.

Tom scoffs aloud. “I’m reasonable, but not to the point where reason tips into lunacy. He needs to redeem himself first. Why do you think all meetings have been closed to him?”

“I think he’s genuinely sorry, for what it’s worth.”

“He’s a coward,” says Tom dismissively, “and now he’s a coward on retreat, reduced to begging to be let back into the fold. I will, when I think he’s earned it. Thus far, all he’s done is clear the bare minimum of keeping his mouth shut.”

“As far as you know,” June says. “He might have talked. He and Dumbledore were always friendly.”

“He hasn’t,” Tom says, confidently. “Dumbledore doesn’t have friends, he has tools. Horace has never liked being among the bluntest of them. He likes to feel polished up every once in a while, appreciated. Dumbledore was never willing to give that to him. Too noble of spirit, I suppose.” His tone dips into a sneer. He glances back down at June. “And you need to get in better graces with him. Especially now. He’ll underestimate you because of the child. Use that.”

“Yes, Minister,” she replies, just as her son begins to fuss. 

Tom steps away, leaving her to it. In a fortnight it will be Christmas. He’ll spend the evening with the Rosiers, watching everyone dote on Lyle’s toddler daughter, while Lydia tries to find off questions as to whether or not she’s with child herself. He’ll ignore his brother-in-law’s sour looks and his father-in-law’s prying questions about when things are going to ‘start moving’ in terms of the placements. 

The Rosiers are evenly divided on it, and Cordelia even tried to request an infant, the nerve of the woman. Their focus is on the school-aged children, the first, second, and third years first. In time, they can expand to incorporate the older and younger. He feels an odd sense of satisfaction, just thinking about it. 

How easy it would be, he thinks, to scoop Mae up, like a tadpole from a pond, and carry her away. And he could do it. He can’t make a legal argument that Amy has in any way broken the Statute of Secrecy, but as for child endangerment… oh, he could have pages and pages written up on that. Still. Honey, not vinegar. He wants to endear the girl to him, not give her more ammunition against him. 

She likes films, by her own admission, so he purchased a glossy book full of colored posters of the last two decades of cinema. Completely pedestrian, but she’s just a child, and this is the sort of thing they enjoy. And a copy of the original print edition of the first Sherlock Holmes, that cost a pretty penny. As well as a small painted figurine of Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc, hair cropped and in full metallic armor, sword raised triumphantly on her rearing horse. 

The satisfaction, Tom reminds himself, as he rejoins the funeral party heading back towards the house for refreshments, isn’t always in wresting something away from someone. Sometimes, there’s more to be found in it being given willingly to you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. As of next chapter we're officially headed into the 1960s, thank you everyone for putting up with this slog of a fic haha.
> 
> 2\. Matthew has been encouraged to get on Pike, his boss', good side by Dumbledore. At the same time, Matthew is encouraging June to get on Dumbledore's good side. Meanwhile, Applewhite and Norbrook are both trying to find some sort of dirt or pressure they can use on Pike to make sure he does not challenge any of Tom's edicts or plans for the future. 
> 
> 3\. Henry Rowle we all may remember as one of the cronies of Tom back in their school days who beat up Matthew. He has since seemingly reformed at least somewhat and become an auror, albeit not a great one. But he did apologize to Matthew for that incident, and seems to genuinely like Doreen, Pike's daughter, so there's something, at least.
> 
> 4\. That sketchy list of 'at risk' muggleborn children seems to just be growing and growing, unsurprisingly, now no longer just including incoming first years, but students already at school and acclimated to the magical world, and possibly younger children who know nothing about magic yet as well. 
> 
> 5\. So there's a been a murder! On the plus side, Virgil Mulciber is finally headed for Azkaban, it looks like, but some are wondering whether or not this is actually a crime he committed. 
> 
> 6\. Carmody is back on the job, and right back to traumatizing children. I didn't really want to do a whole repeat of the famous boggart scene from canon, but I also thought there was reason for Mae to fear what her boggart might turn into... so much like how Lupin tries to prevent Harry from facing his boggart in class because of a concern of Voldemort popping up, Mae decides she needs to fake sick, just in case everyone starts to wonder why their classmate would be scared of the Minister. 
> 
> 7\. I'll give everyone a few guesses as to what Eileen might have been trying to ask the school nurse for.
> 
> 8\. Tom's just as delusional as ever, but has been forced to shift his focus now that he A. knows of Mae's existence, B. knows she is undoubtedly his child, and C. has finally met her in person. He wants to play a paternal role despite claiming to not expect to ever feel any genuine love for his daughter, and is also trying to frame it to himself as a way of hurting/controlling Amy, by winning over Mae against all odds. While he acknowledges he does have a very convenient legal avenue to try to forcibly take Mae away, he also seems to want to try to preserve (or improve) Mae's opinion of him as a person and as her father, so he's shifting to an... unnervingly honeyed approach, as opposed to his usual standards threats and menace. 
> 
> 9\. Tom is convinced the prophecy may concern June and Arthur's infant son, but is also trying to clamp down on those fears and 'not doing anything rash' (we'll see how successful he is at that). He also remains reasonably confident that June and Arthur themselves are committed to the cause, but worries that their son might rebel against this status quo in the future, as pesky teenagers are wont to do. And unlike most of his mind invasions, Tom has thus far been able to be willingly admitted into June's thoughts and memories, which is a very different experience than trying to crack through someone's psyche. 
> 
> 10\. Aw, Tom got his daughter some carefully calculated, obsessively planned out Christmas presents! How sweet and creepy at the same time! As always, you can find me on [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	38. Mae XVIII - Tom VIII - Amy XVII

MARCH 1960, HOGWARTS

“Happy birthday dear Mae, happy birthday to you!” 

Mae cringes as her name is stretched out into multiple syllables by Valerie and Christine’s enthusiastic warbling, before Marian plunks down the lopsided and disheveled coffee cake in front of her, scattering walnuts across the paper plate. It looks terrible; lumpy and slightly flattened on the one end, as if it’d been dropped twice, but it smells amazing, she’ll admit as much.

“Two hours,” Marian says testily; there’s a little flour on her cheek, though Mae doesn’t feel like point that out right now. “Malcolm swore he knew how to bake it-,”

“Pipe down,” Malcolm snaps, looking around furtively from his position in a high backed blue velvet arm chair, as Maureen giggles, perched on the arm. “I don’t need it getting around that I was baking a bloody cake-,”

“Oooh, Mrs. McGonagall, such a happy homemaker,” Valerie teases in a sing-song voice, prompting him to pluck up a loose walnut and chuck it at her as Mae smacks his knuckles with her fork.

“I’m trying to eat!”

“Then eat, birthday girl!”

“Keep it down over there!” Hughie Weaver barks from the other side of the massive bronze globe dominating the common room. He and some fellow seventh years are alternating between studying obsessively for their upcoming NEWTs, and arguing over whether Eisenhower’s response in Vietnam is justified or not, and if witches and wizards have a moral duty to assist in the civil rights protests. None of which seems to be reducing their stress.

Mae doesn’t know much about that, but she has walked past plenty of pubs and shops with signs out front proudly proclaiming, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”, which always made Mum walk a bit faster, a scowl on her face until they passed it. Mae didn’t understand at the time what any of the three had in common beyond people acting like wankers towards them. 

Mae makes a rude gesture at Hughie once his back is turned, then turns back to her friends, feeling oddly touched. Marian’s the only one who got her a proper gift, a pair of colored glass earrings in the shape of red ladybugs, but a cake is still a cake, and it’s a Tuesday night, not exactly a convenient time to get together to celebrate anyone’s birthday.

Fourteen isn’t even a very big deal. It’s got none of the magic of turning thirteen and becoming a teenager, it’s not as nearly as enticing as sixteen, which is the age all the singers are crooning about on the radio, and it’s not even seventeen, the precipice of adulthood. Fourteen is just… somewhere in the middle, and it doesn’t feel all that real or relevant, just a passing milestone, a sign along the road. 

At least she’s taller now, even if she hasn’t really got breasts yet, she thinks, resisting the urge to pick at one of her bra straps under her rumpled school blouse, which has been itching at her shoulder for the past few minutes. 

“The Ides of March,” Malcolm says, yet again. He fancies himself an aspiring historian now, and Mae really wishes Maureen would stop indulging in his rants about various emperors and generals, because none of the rest of them could care any less about who gave what speech or lost what battle or decided to march on Russia in the middle of winter. Truly. She can’t wait until she can drop History of Magic after fifth year. 

“Don’t worry,” Valerie pats Mae on the shoulder as she licks icing off her lips, “we’re not planning your murder or anything.”

“Thanks,” Mae snorts, and even Christine giggles as she crunches on a walnut.

“Happy birthday, Benson!” Agneza Gavran calls over her shoulder, having noted their little party, as she makes for the stairwell leading to the girls’ dorms. She’s grown out her blonde hair, which flows down her back in a platinum ponytail.

Mae feels her face heat up from the attention, but disguises it by taking a sip of her tea, before pulling a very different face. “Ugh, who made this pot? It’s awful!”

“Not me,” Marian says, casting a look at Valerie.

“My dad says anyone who can’t make a proper pot of tea should be lined up and shot,” Christine informs her.

“Oh, have mercy!” Valerie drawls, unaffected. “I like coffee better, besides.”

“Who is letting you drink coffee?” Malcolm snorts. 

“My dad, sometimes!”

“There’s this coffee bar down the street from my our flat,” Maureen still has the slightly nervous air of someone trying to break into a clique, even though she and Malcolm have technically been ‘going steady’ since October, when he finally got around to asking her out instead of just snogging in broom closets with her. 

Maureen’s nice enough, Mae supposes, though her haircut makes her look a little like a poodle mix, and she tends to be quite shy when she’s not spouting off all the answers in class. “It’s really neat,” she continues, plucking at the sleeve of her jumper, “they play music, and the owner’s got this little terrier that runs around nipping at people-,”

“Sounds terrible,” Malcolm says, kissing her on the cheek.

Mae finishes off her slice of cake, and pitches the plate into the nearest rubbish bin, which, as usual, is fit to overflow by this late in the evening. The Ravenclaw common room is never a very rowdy place, but the older students have clearly had enough, between the birthday party and a group of second years playing Exploding Snaps and trading Chocolate Frog cards in front of one of the hearths. 

The grandfather clock between two of the bookshelves begins to toll, as do multiple other clocks around the room- whoever was in charge of the decorating here, Mae thinks, clearly had a passion for timepieces. 

“Right!” Hugh is taking a stand, one foot up on his chair as if he were a character from a play or musical about to launch into a solo. “That’s nine o’clock, all lower years, go to bed! No! I don’t want to hear it, McGonagall! Byrd, Darvesh, Faraday, Benson! Kick off!” His gaze narrows in on Mae, who has crossed her arms rebelliously against her chest. “Goodnight! If you don’t have exams to study for, get the hell out!”

“Prefects aren’t supposed to curse,” Christine reminds him waspishly.

“Five points from Ravenclaw,” Eileen Prince says, without looking up from her textbook, brow permanently creased from stress. “Now get out.”

Mae trudges upstairs with her friends, though Maureen and Malcolm linger to give one another the sort of excruciatingly embarrassingly long hug everyone their age who’s dating someone indulges in, as if they’re picturing themselves as some modern day Romeo and Juliet, separated by the cruel whims of the Ravenclaw prefects. 

Once upstairs, Marian heads straight into the adjoining bathroom to shower, while Valerie fiddles with her violin, trying to play without sight music. Christine preoccupies herself with finishing an essay that’s due at the end of the week. Mae flops back onto her bed, wondering where Sal’s run off to, though he comes and goes as he pleases, especially now that the weather is finally starting to warm up. 

She’s startled by a tapping at the window; a nondescript grey owl. Neither Valerie nor Christine comment on it, likely assuming it’s just a message from her mum. But Mae already had a ‘birthday breakfast’ with Mum this morning, since she didn’t have class until ten o’clock, and she doubts Mum would be sending her a note this late unless it was an emergency, in which case she’d just come fetch Mae herself; all of the professors can easily access the common rooms, after all. 

Mae removes the furled scroll from the owl’s talons, though it pecks at her because she doesn’t have any treats to offer it, and slinks into the corner behind her bed, sitting down so her her back is to it and she is hidden from the view of her roommates, to read it. She has some idea, deep in her bones, of who it might be from. He sent her Christmas gifts, after all, though Mum spent a week poring over them before she deemed them safe and let Mae actually look at them.

She unfurls the scroll, then frowns at the nonsense words, then reads it again, biting her lip as she thinks. It’s a cipher, she’s almost certain it is, she’s just not sure what type. Mae feels a stab of guilt at her excitement, the flush in her cheeks from the challenge of it. She doesn’t actually know much about ciphers, she’s only seen them briefly referenced in detective novels. 

And she shouldn’t even want to decode this one. It’s like Mum said, he’s just manipulating her, trying to lure her into a sense of false security, make her think he can be trusted, that he really cares for her. He doesn’t. He’s a liar and a murderer and he’s just toying with her. She doesn’t care what his stupid letter even says. Mae crumples up the paper and shoves it her desk drawer, then slams it shut. 

She picks up one of the books Mum got her for her birthday instead; Les Miserables, though fortunately not in the original French. Mae’s still pretty proficient in Spanish, but Mum’s attempts to teach her French over the years never amounted to much, since she never used it in her daily business. She kicks off her worn down shoes and clambers back up onto her bed, the extremely heavy book in hand, not bothering to change out of her uniform and put on her pyjamas just yet. 

She doesn’t care about him, and she certainly doesn’t need him, anymore than she ever did. She’s finally started to feel like she actually belongs here, not just like an unwanted visitor, and she isn’t going to let him muck it up by trying to get his claws into her. Besides, she’s got one over on him, doesn’t she? He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s her father. Bet the Daily Prophet would love a tell-all interview, if he decides to act like a bastard. 

APRIL 1960, DOVER

Tom can’t recall the last time he was actually called out of the office on professional business, as opposed to personal, but there is something bracingly charming about the white cliffs of Dover in the early spring, like one of those quaint muggle poems espousing England’s natural beauty, and the sky is a clear, cloudless blue as he makes his way along the rocky path overlooking the sea, far below. Norbrook accompanies him; he looks rather pleased to be out of the stuffy office as well, even if the wind is sending his thinning hair into a tufty frenzy.

“Pike,” he says, as they near those waiting for them, “won’t be pleased you delayed informing him.”

“He should appreciate my willingness to put boots on the ground and see the process of justice for myself,” Tom says. “And he can hardly complain when it was his aurors who lost their quarry in the first place.” He lets a corner of his mouth curl up into a sharp, hooked smile as the wind turns to face their backs, rather than buffet them from the front. 

“Besides, he can have full authority over Isola’s trial. Merlin knows it will be brief.” He is rather glad, on second thought, that most of the rules surrounding proof of guilt and what constitutes proper evidence have not been updated yet. It will certainly make things much less tedious to proceed as they did when punishing Grindelwald’s foreign agents. They say the quickest trial during the war lasted all of thirty minutes before deliberations were over and a verdict passed down. 

Michael Applewhite has never looked more the outdoorsman; he has the sort of appearance that lends itself well to crisp, sunny, slightly damp days like this one, his wavy blonde hair gleaming brightly in the sunshine like burnished gold, his blue eyes lively and triumphant in his cleft-jawed, handsome face. His dark red hit wizard’s robes are slightly rumpled and wetted by the sea spray carried up from the crashing waves below, but other than that he is a good sight better looking than his prisoner.

The last Tom laid eyes on Jaime Isola was, strange as it sounds, two and a half years ago, in that interrogation chamber across from the holding cells. He feels a savage twist of pleasure to behold him again, an elected Minister, never more powerful than he is now, and Isola on his knees, beaten and bloodied, looking even gaunter and older than before, the odd streak of silvery grey in his dark, matted hair. He’s missing his jacket and one shoe and shivering violently, automatically, from the cool sea air, and he’s clearly been charmed silent; his jaw works, but no words are audible. 

“Where did the French corner him?” Tom asks Applewhite, as if Isola were deaf as well. He’s glaring daggers at both him and Norbrook, who seems mildly amazed by the entire event, as if he can’t quite believe he’s here. He should feel honored, Tom thinks. He doesn’t involve people in these sorts of affairs lightly. 

“Toulouse,” Applewhite shrugs. “He got lazy, thought he’d pick up an odd job or two while the heat was off him. They nabbed him during a club bust, shipped him straight up to us.”

“It seems I owe Minister Solomon a note of thank you,” Tom says, smiling without teeth. “And you as well, Michael. Well done on acting so quickly on this.”

Applewhite all but broadens with pride, shoulders lifting slightly, then tosses a scornful look down at Isola. “It’s as much as he deserves, for what he did to Taylor.”

Tom nods briefly, then releases the charm on Isola with a snap of his fingers. Applewhite looks askance at him, and keeps his wand at the ready, though he produces another from his pocket, a slightly bent wand clearly of a different design than Ollivander’s creations. Tom takes Jaime Isola’s wand into his hand, turns it over thoughtfully, then tosses it off the side of the cliff, mere yards away, where it drops into the sea.

Isola swallows, but remains silent.

“Oh, don’t hold back on my account,” Tom says. “You had rather a lot to say the last time we spoke.”

Isola’s slightly bleary gaze; he looks as though he hasn’t slept in a few days, given the bags under his exhausted eyes, one of which is filled up with blood; flickers up to Tom. His lips curl back to reveal yellowed, slightly crooked teeth. “Go fuck yourself,” he says, enunciating carefully as if concerned Tom might miss it the first time. 

Applewhite hits him hard enough for his head to snap to the side, a healing cut opening back up on his cheek and oozing fresh blood. Isola is obviously straining against the spells keeping him restrained, but try as he might he cannot stand, or move his arms from where they’re pinned at his sides. 

“Let go of him,” Tom says, and Applewhite obeys without question; Isola wobbles and nearly topples over in the long grass, but manages to keep his balance on his knobby knees, though his nose wrinkles with the effort of staying upright. 

Tom makes an impulsive, but satisfying decision. “Go back to the road,” he orders Applewhite and Norbrook. “We won’t be long.”

Applewhite frowns and opens his mouth to protest the idea of leaving the minister he is so loyal to with a murderous criminal, albeit a restrained one, but when Norbrook starts walking back without hesitation, he follows, though he casts a venomous look at Isola before he goes. Tom waits until their footfall dies away. The only sounds are the wind, the waves crashing against the rocks, and the distant cry of gulls. Far off in the distance, a fishing boat bobs along, peaceful as can be. The sun is a pleasantly misty haze in the sky overhead, warming his skin even as the wind chills it.

“So what now?” Isola rasps. “Is this the cliff you dump all your bodies off of, Minister?”

Tom smiles banally down at him. “You know,” he says. “I have you every opportunity to avoid this mess, when we last met. Really. You could have been transferred back to a Spanish prison, done your time, and been on your merry little way. Instead you decided to play the hero. And I just can’t imagine why. What was in it for you? Money?” He scoffs quietly. “Fond regard? Come on now, Isola. It was one little forgery. I can’t imagine it was worth your life, no matter what she promised.”

“It would be inconvenient if I started talking about that, huh?” Isola presses with a slick, queasy sort of grin. “Can’t have that getting out, can we? Your little, ah… keepsake?”

“Crucio,” Tom says, almost under his breath, without a moment’s notice.

Isola’s words turn into a guttural sob deep in his throat; he can’t physically writhe in pain, but he throws his head back in agony, neck convulsing as though he were choking or seizing. 

“I really don’t know who you imagine you’ll be talking to,” Tom says, mildly. “There’s not much of that in store for your future.” He waits until the agony of the curse has passed some, and Isola seems conscious of what he is saying. “I just wonder if it was really worth it. What did she promise you, to do that for her?”

“Nothing,” says Isola, through his teeth. “I did the work I was paid to do.”

“Really? I can’t imagine a struggling single mother had much in the way of funds.”

Isola says nothing, just closes his eyes as if to calm himself. Tom is familiar with that. The last attempts at dignity in defeat. Some sort of noble acceptance. 

“Well, you needn’t worry about her now,” Tom says. “Trust me. She’ll be well taken care of.”

It gets the response he was looking for. Isola’s eyes snap open, full of loathing. “Espero que ella te ve muerto, hijo de puta.”

Tom doesn’t know much Spanish, but he gets the gist of it. “You know, I did tell her that when I found you, you were going to wish you’d never met her,” he says, glancing beyond Isola to the vast, slate grey ocean beyond. 

“I don’t think you’re there yet. It’s understandable. She has a charming way about her, when she wants to be liked. I can only imagine the things she told you. Or did for you. But that’s alright. You’ll have plenty of time to reach that point. Now, I’ve never visited Azkaban before, but perhaps I’ll drop in from time to time. Every few years or so. You’ve got a life sentence to serve. I wouldn’t want to impede on that, Mister Isola.”

Isola makes a level attempt to thrust himself forward, restrained as he is, to headbutt Tom in the stomach. Tom easily sidesteps this attempt and watches him collide with the ground with a muffled grunt. He considers drawing his wand, then draws back his foot instead, and kicks him, as hard as he can, in the ribs. He doesn’t hear a crack the first time, so he properly puts some force into it the second, and is rewarded.

Isola is breathing raggedly in pain, tears streaming down his wind chapped face. 

“When I confronted her about it,” Tom says, with vicious satisfaction, “her… thievery, she broke down and begged. She cried. Screamed, too. She would have thrown you under the bus with a moment’s notice, had she the choice. A mother will do anything to protect her child. And all three of us know exactly what you are. Scum.”

“Her child?” Isola asks the dirt, though his voice trembles from the pain of a broken rib. 

Tom’s next kick connects squarely with his head, and he doesn’t say anything else after that. 

“Minister!”

Tom glances over, annoyed, as Norbrook comes hurrying through the long grass towards him, looking stricken. 

“What?” he snaps, as Arthur comes up short, breathless from his jog back up the hillside.

“There’s just been word from London,” he says hoarsely. “Pike’s leading a raid on the Prince household.”

Tom’s blood runs cold for a moment, before he composes himself. The roar of the ocean seems to have faded to a dull buzzing in his ears, and he can feel the blood rising to his temple. “On what evidence of a crime?”

“I don’t know,” Norbrook says helplessly, then seems to regret it at the way Tom expression darkens. “There’s a rumor he got tipped off. By some reporter.”

“You’ll find out which reporter for me by the end of today,” Tom says sharply. He checks his pocket watch, then exhales. “When did he leave Ministry headquarters?”

“Less than an hour ago. Do you want me to send someone else out there-,”

“No,” says Tom. “I can’t be seen to publicly interfere with something like this. We’ll handle it when we know what they found. If they found anything.” He is already mentally running through every event, every interaction Edgar Prince might have been privy to as a member of the Knights of Walpurgis. Every closed door meeting, every hushed conversation, every command or order. Unless he’s going senile, he’ll keep his mouth shut. But if he has anything written down… 

Tom tenses internally at the thought. He’s been careless. Had thought the chances of something like this happening, of the aurors being given justification to actually perform a search, were slim to none. Clearly he was wrong. He’s been careless, and there’s nothing he can do about it now. Prince needs to hold his tongue.

So long as he maintains innocence and doesn’t start running his mouth, he’ll be fine. They will be fine. Tom has fail-safes in place. He doesn’t want to have to use them, but he can and he will. If worst comes to worst, he can distance himself, he has enough rope to keep himself from being caught up in the noose. 

Still, his stomach churns, an unprecedented and unwelcome sensation. He hasn’t felt nerves like this… well, not since the last time he spoke to her. To Amy.

APRIL 1960, HOGWARTS

Amy is failing quite badly at chess against Iris in the teacher’s lounge when word gets out that Eileen Prince has gone missing. 

Iris might be seen as a ditz by some, teaching a ‘fluff stuff’ subject with ‘no real value’ like Divination, but she is a far better hand at wizard’s chess than Amy ever has been or will be, and Amy finds herself slouching in her seat as Iris trounces her so thoroughly, a small smile playing on Iris’ pink lips when she finally looks up from the board, small hands folded neatly under her sharp chin. “Checkmate,” she announces, cheerily, just as the door slams open.

Amy stiffens in her seat immediately, the comfortable air of the staff room cut short by the arrival of Victor Morgenstern, who was in charge of chaperoning the Hogsmeade trip today. Iris looks over as well, brow furrowed, as does Sidney, who is in the middle of refilling his thermos with fresh hot chocolate. Nigel Romilly and Kalliope Witherspoon look up from their books, and Professor Beery pauses in the middle of marking a stack of Herbology tests. 

“So, we’ve a slight problem,” Morgenstern begins, hedging his bets, as any Arithmancer is want to. 

“Don’t tell me Nott’s popped round for a visit,” Sid snaps. 

“One of the students hasn’t returned from Hogsmeade,” Morgenstern says, raising his hands as if in surrender. “I did a triple count when they were all back behind the castle walls. Eileen Prince is missing.”

“Students are tardy like this all the time,” Beery says dismissively, glancing at the clock. “It’s only half past five. She might be skulking in just about now, embarrassed to be late.”

“Cringle is watching the gates,” Morgenstern says, “but this is unlike her. She’s a prefect, a seventh year. No one recalls seeing her down in the village, but she certainly left with us all today at noon. I shared a carriage with her and a few other students. And she didn’t go back early, she would have had to check in with me first.”

Amy stands up. “We’ve got two hours until sunset. It’s possible she did walk up by herself ahead of time, Victor. A few of us should search the castle just in case this is a false alarm.”

“I’ll check the Ravenclaw common room and the library right now,” Sid offers, setting down his thermos. 

“I’ll try the kitchens,” Iris says. “Merlin knows students are always popping down there ahead of their dinner, spoiling their appetites.”

Witherspoon stands up as well, with a sigh. “Then Amy, you and I will head down to the village. Victor, if she’s not found soon, do inform Dumbledore and Headmaster Dippet. The last thing we need is the DOME getting wind of us losing a student, even one who’s about to graduate.”

He nods, flustered, and Amy slips on her corduroy jacket, ignoring the slight shiver that comes over her as she does so, and follows Witherspoon out of the room. 

“Truthfully, I’m just glad for the exercise,” Kalliope confides in her with a small, wry smile. “I’ve been cooped up all day writing lesson plans and review packets for my seventh years.”

Amy nods in commiseration as they head downstairs. 

“Eileen is in my NEWT level Charms,” she continues, glancing at Amy. “And your NEWT Potions, right?”

“She is,” Amy says, thinking back to Eileen’s sullen face in class. Change in wardrobe and a less timid attitude aside, she can’t think of anything immediately concerning about her beyond her obvious lack of many close friends or even acquaintances. 

Eileen seems a bit trapped, really. Her parents are obviously trying to fit in with the pureblood elite, but may never be fully accepted by that circle, and Eileen clearly hasn’t been. At the same time, she likely can’t relate to many of her more ‘ordinary’ halfblood and muggleborn classmates, and her reserved, intense nature doesn’t help matters much. 

Amy feels another pang of guilt. Has she failed Eileen, and other students like her, too caught up in her own problems, her own anxieties? She’s supposed to be an adult they can rely on, but instead she’s been floundering herself, jumping from one stress to another. 

“Sometimes girls like her,” Kalliope says thoughtfully, as they break out of doors into the bright spring sunshine, the day deceptively serene, “tend to do a bit better after they’re out of school and away from all this. She’s very bright, she just needs to stand on her own two feet for once. I can’t imagine that’s easy with those fussy parents of hers. But I have faith. Eileen’s sharper than most of us give her credit for, I think. Easily one of my best students. It’s a shame she’s been held back by so much meaningless pretense and tradition.”

“I think she’s been very lonely,” Amy says. 

Apollyon Cringle is standing by the gates, grumbling to himself; when she looks askance at him, he shakes his head. 

Amy exhales in concern as they pass the caretaker without breaking their stride. “This isn’t like her. Eileen can be… moody, but she’s a good girl. She’s a prefect, for Circe’s sake.”

“Well, I couldn’t blame her for a little last minute rebellion, after the dramatics of this past year,” Witherspoon mutters, as they exit the castle grounds and begin the downhill walk into the village, spread out beneath them like a model diorama. 

The lake is gleaming dark velvety blue in the light, the forest a rich, verdant green as it flourishes again. For a moment Amy is struck by the beauty, and the sweet, familiar smells in the air. At the very least, Hogwarts has always felt like home, even at her lowest points. That much is undeniable. 

“Really,” Witherspoon continues. “All this nonsense from the Ministry. And I could tolerate them breathing down our necks- God knows we could be more organized, honestly, and we’ll need to be, with how quickly our student body is growing- but this business with the muggleborns…” She exhales. “It’s unprecedented and invasive. The Ministry has always been content to let well enough alone. Extreme circumstances are one thing. Taking children away from their parents because they’re not keen on witchcraft is another. There is always a learning curve. People take time to adapt to these things.”

“You think it’s really going to happen?” Amy presses. “I thought it might just be fearmongering, scare tactics. Dumbledore doesn’t seem overly concerned-,”

“Dumbledore is willing to allow for what he might term as temporary sacrifices for the greater good,” Kalliope says shortly. “I have great respect for Albus as an educator and as a man, but his vision is narrow, keen as his mind is. His priority is neutering Gaunt. As it should be. But in the mean time… he is willing to let some… smaller pieces scatter to the floor, shall we say.” 

She gestures with a hand as they crunch gravel underfoot. A dog barks in the distance, and the wind rushes through the heather. 

Amy presses her lips together, then says, “I don’t know what I’d do if they tried to take Mae.”

Kalliope looks at her in concern, almost maternally. “Oh, my dear- Amy. No one is going to take your daughter from you. You’re a professor. A witch yourself.”

“She’s registered as a muggleborn with the Ministry,” Amy says tightly.

“Well, they’d have a hell of a time justifying how you’re impeding her magical development!”

Amy shrugs slightly. “This administration seems to have a flair for forcing things through.”

They both fall silent for a moment.

“You’ve been a staff member for two years now,” Kalliope says, as they enter the village. “And I know you sometimes feel on the outskirts because you’re young, but I hope you know that you have our support. We professors have to band together. And I’m not just talking about Dumbledore’s notion of an Order. Don’t ever hesitate to ask for help.”

Amy smiles slightly, wishing she could believe it more, but it’s difficult, as they pass the Carmody-Norbrook home, where a paper windmill sputters along in the front garden, and the faint cries of an infant can be heard through a window half-opened to permit the spring breeze.

Now that the crowds of boisterous students have cleared out, Hogsmeade is quiet and tranquil once more, the odd pedestrian wandering along the cobblestone lanes, the shops more or less empty, the pubs starting to fill up as the twilight approaches. Amy and Witherspoon duck their heads into the usual haunts; the sweets shop, the Hog’s Head, the music shop and Gladrags, the broom shop and the book shop. None of them have seen Eileen recently, and there’s no signs of her anywhere. 

Amy is beginning to grow genuinely alarmed; maybe it’s leftover concern for Mae, who is only four years younger than Eileen, after all, maybe it’s lingering guilt for not having done more for Eileen in the first place. But how do you solve a problem like that? It’s not so much that Eileen seems to come from a home where she’s in danger of being physically harmed, but where she’s in danger of being, well, spiritually ground down into dust and spat back out an opinionless automaton. 

“Is it possible she could have left the village completely?” she asks Kalliope, as they stop to catch their breath in the village square. “There’s not anti-apparition wards up, and she’s of age…”

Kalliope grimaces. “It’s possible, but I don’t want to think she’d be so foolish. She’s so close to graduating; she knows she’d get in tremendous trouble if she was caught skipping out like that. And where would she want to go, anyways? Home?”

Amy doubts that’s the case; Eileen seems rather like she’d prefer to be anywhere but home… and anywhere but here, too. She glances around, hands in her pockets. If they go back up the castle without Eileen, there really will be an alarmed raise, and Antony Nott will be here in a moment’s notice, ready to rain down hellfire. After all, Eileen isn’t ‘expendable’, is she? She’s a Prince. 

“The shack,” Witherspoon says suddenly, pointing.

Amy cranes her neck to see what she’s gesturing to. The population of Hogsmeade has steadily declined, she recalls Dippet saying at a dinner once, over the centuries, and there’s more than a few abandoned cottages on the outskirts of the village. Most have succumbed to ruins, barely more than the remnants of stone walls and ancient foundations, but a few are still standing. She vaguely recalls Matthew once saying something about a few of his friends sneaking into one.

“She might have slipped off there,” she acknowledges. “Can’t hurt to check it out.”

She and Kalliope turn down a side street, then break onto a dirt road winding around the borders of the village. The shack is flanked by a stone wall degraded down into clumps like cairns; the roof is not caved in but covered in moss and vines, and the windows are boarded up, the wind whistling through the crevices. 

Amy draws her wand, exchanging a look with Witherspoon, who is wincing now that they are on loose earth, a poor combination with her prosthetic leg. “I’ll go ahead,” Amy says, concerned. “You can wait here-,”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Kalliope bristles, “let’s both of us just-,”

There’s a low murmur of conversation, and Amy starts forward, wand raised in alarm, as Eileen comes around the corner of the ruined shack, followed by none other than June Carmody. Eileen looks like she’s been crying; her eyes seem red and swollen, and her pale, sallow face is splotchy with color. Carmody seems much calmer and composed in contrast, though she look thrilled at the sight of Amy and Witherspoon. Amy lowers her wand warily. 

“No need to fuss,” June says coolly. “Eileen’s all in one piece.”

“You heard we were looking for her?” Kalliope asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Obviously. Mark down at the post office let me know he’d seen her wandering up here, rather upset.”

Eileen is avoiding eye contact, her gaze trained on the mossy ground.

“Eileen, why did you come up here?” Amy asks her directly, exasperated, and hardly trusting of Carmody’s word.

“I was sending a letter, and an owl came in from home, from my mother,” Eileen says, dark gaze lifting to stare at Amy and Kalliope. “My father’s in trouble.”

“Legal trouble,” Carmody clarifies.

Amy has no idea why Eileen would go to Hogsmeade’s tiny post office to send mail instead of just sending it from the castle directly, unless she was contacting someone with a muggle address. But the chances of Eileen having many muggle friends seem awfully low. 

Witherspoon looks as if she wants to ask exactly what kind of legal troubles, and Amy would be very interested to know herself, but Eileen is obviously distraught, and Amy is leery of pressing her too hard in front of Carmody. 

“Well, I’ll walk her back up to the castle with you,” June says, a hand on Eileen’s slumped shoulder. “We don’t want to miss out on dinner, do we?”

“Who’s staying with Sean?” Amy asks, suddenly.

Carmody pauses, then says, “My sister-in-law, if you must know. Don’t worry, Professor Benson. I do have some idea of what to do with a baby.”

Witherspoon sucks in a breath, but Amy just turns on her heel and strides forward, head bent against the breeze. 

Eileen manages to avoid any serious punishment upon their return to the castle, mostly due to Carmody’s intervention, it would seem to Amy, but the weather has clouded over by the time they’re all safely inside, and she can feel her energy sap just as the downpour starts. Rather than going to dinner with everyone else, she stops by the kitchen for soup and a sandwich, then retreats to her room, sitting down on the edge of her bed. 

Mae is safe and happy enough. There are forces at work against Tom’s government. And she doesn’t have a caseworker breathing down her neck the way so many muggle parents do at this moment. Eileen wasn’t hurt, just upset, and Carmody’s spying has been hampered by motherhood. If anything, she should be relieved that nothing terrible has happened this school year. Castor Mulciber is dead, and whether Virgil Mulciber killed him or not, at the very least he’s behind bars and can’t hurt anyone else. There’s been no more disturbing prophecies, and Tom hasn’t come calling since this summer. 

Her stomach tightens at the thought. She asked Mae if she’d gotten any mysterious gifts for her birthday two weeks back, but she hadn’t. And her Christmas gifts… well, they were just that. Gifts. Expensive things someone clearly put some thought into picking out. Things he thought Mae would enjoy. The idea of him knowing Mae was his child was one thing. The idea of him… of Tom wanting to know her personally, on an individual level, is quite another. Amy can’t even think of them face to face without feeling sick to her stomach. 

She should be relieved. Most people don’t buy gifts for children they want to murder. Tom clearly has an interest in Mae as a person, beyond just a blood connection. But that’s just what makes it so horrible. Amy cannot- it took her until she was eighteen, truthfully, to see him for what he was. They’d known each other for a good twelve years before that. Mae… Mae doesn’t have that built-in resistance. Amy has told her as much as she can, given her all the warnings, but what does that matter, when she’s confronted with the man himself? She’s not blind. And Tom isn’t stupid. He’s charismatic. He’s charming. He knows how to get people to open up, and he doesn’t necessarily have to invade their minds to do so.

She goes to bed early; she has a class to teach at nine o’clock sharp tomorrow. She tosses and turns for what seems like an hour, before drifting into an unpleasant dream. A memory, really. 

She stands before another abandoned shack of sorts, not accompanied by Kalliope Witherspoon, but a soldier named Frank. He is leaning heavily against her, and they are both panting from exertion, their breath misting in the frigid air. 

“You need to go,” he says, hoarsely, voice cracking from pain and the cold. “Now. I can.. I’ll be alright. Just go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, and forges forward, through the slush and mud. “Help me open this door. We can hide in here.”

She guides him to it, and together they manage to yank open the rotting wood. He tries to let her go first, but Amy all but shoves him inside, then closes the door behind them, sinking down onto the rotting, muddy floor. He staggers over to a crooked, broken chair in a corner and sits down with a groan, while Amy rests her head in her freezing, shaking hands for a moment, trying to collect herself. The wind howls and snowflakes spiral outside, and beyond that, another low moan winds its way through the village. 

“What- what are we hiding from?” he asks hollowly.

Amy sniffs, wiping at her nose, then looks up at him. “It’s better that you don’t know,” she says.

“Why?” he snaps, then winces again, at hand at his side. 

She stands up on trembling legs, wiping off her muddied trouser legs as best she can, tucked into her boots. “Because it’ll be one less thing they have to wipe from your memory.”

He stares at her wildly as she takes out her wand. “Stay away from me.”

She coughs and shuffles forward to heal him as best she can anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. So it's been a pretty chill year at Hogwarts aside from Castor Mulciber getting murdered and Mae's dad trying to be secret penpals with her. 
> 
> 2\. Malcolm does enjoy baking, actually, and he does it a lot with his mum at home. Minerva is hopeless in the kitchen.
> 
> 3\. Mae was born on March 15th, the Ides of March, a suitably dramatic date for a very dramatic teenager. And big kudos to her for trying to get through Les Mis at age 14. 
> 
> 4\. The takeaway from Tom in this chapter is probably that he is not just arrogant in his dealings with Amy and Mae, but in how he conducts himself in general. Having finally gotten his hands on Jaime Isola, instead of killing him outright, Tom chooses to gloat and goad and assure him that he'll be living a long life in solitary confinement in Azkaban. At the same time as he's doing this, having delayed Pike finding out so he could confront Isola personally, Pike is raiding Edgar Prince's household after getting tipped off about possible evidence of the Knights of Walpurgis being involved in committing actual crimes. 
> 
> 5\. Eileen is still having a pretty rough time with things, and Amy feels considerable guilt about not being able to devote more time and energy to helping her students, when she's just been trying to keep her and Mae's heads above water. At the same time, Amy is relieved that there haven't been any other dramatic revelations this year... yet haha. 
> 
> 6\. At the end of this chapter Amy has another dream of a memory from her time in France with Shelby, possibly triggered by the experience of investigating the shack (which will later become the Shrieking Shack) with Witherspoon.
> 
> 7\. As always you can find me on tumblr at [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	39. Mae XIX - Tom IX

HOGWARTS, JUNE 1960

“Quills down,” Professor Binns drones. Mae is actually certain he fell asleep, or fazed out, or whatever it is ghosts do when they sort of flicker and fizzle into dustmotes, and that this exam was supposed to conclude three minutes ago, but at least it’s not as bad as the time Binns lost the entire thread ten minutes into a lecture and then vanished for the rest of class. 

And at least History of Magic was their last exam of the week, and the official end to the term, academics wise. It’s Friday the 24th; they’re all going home tomorrow morning, or, well, everyone who doesn’t live in Hogsmeade like her is.

Mae passes up her exam to the person in front of her, waiting impatiently for them all to be neatly stacked atop Binns’ desk by John Amory, since Binns can’t actually pick up their papers themselves. 

“Dismissed,” Binns finally croaks in a papery whisper once he has all of their tests, and is promptly drowned out by the explosion of noise in the warm, stuffy classroom as everyone jumps to their feet and pushes in their chairs, grabbing their bookbags and filing outside.

She always feels a bit bitter at the end of the school year, unable to join in the general fuss and excitement of packing up her things and preparing for the long train ride back to London, but it doesn’t feel as terrible as it did when she was a first year, and she still has tonight with her friends. Truth be told, she’s not really looking forward to the summer holiday, unless Aunt Ruby pays another unexpected visit, or Auntie V and Uncle Danny offer to take them along on vacation or something. 

Mum will be tense and stressed out without school to keep them both busy, constantly double checking all the locks and hovering over Mae, and while Mae won’t miss the homework, she will miss actually having different things to do all day. What she’s got to do this summer, besides read, listen to the radio, and go see the occasional film?

She follows Valerie and Malcolm out of the room, Christine and Marian on her heels, and into the nearest courtyard, now drenched in summer sunshine as a fountain burbles merrily. There’s a distant toll of bells, not to mark the passing hour but to celebrate the official end of exams, and Mae looks on, smirking, as a group of seventh years run by, whooping and hollering in relief, tearing off their black robes and bundling them under their arms as they make for the nearest gate leading out onto the grounds. 

“I can’t wait until that’s us,” Christine says longingly, watching them celebrate. “It only gets worse from here on out. Next year we’re fourth years, and then we’ll have OWLs in our fifth year, and then NEWTs-,”

“Thank you for that crucial update, Christine,” Mae mutters under her breath, while Malcolm rolls his eyes as he flags down Maureen, who skips over with two Hufflepuff friends. 

Christine shoots her a glower, but lets it go in order to begin pestering Marian about what answer she put for the second to last question, which Marian, who is the sort of person who loves to go over the test after the fact, and is only to happy to oblige her.

“They’re insane,” Mae comments to Valerie, who just shrugs, looking as relieved as she feels to be done with schoolwork. 

“Let them talk now. I don’t have to ever think about it again.” Valerie frowns, freckled nose wrinkled. “At least not until they send my scores home. Only, I can usually just grab them before my parents see; my mum’s terrified of owls, and my dad doesn’t even think they count like real school marks…” 

She trails off somewhat awkwardly. 

Valerie said there was another very long interview with some Ministry worker when she came home for the Easter holiday, but she doesn’t know what happened during it, because they sent her upstairs. She said her mum was crying a bit after it, though, but her parents wouldn’t tell her what was said, only that she shouldn’t worry about grownup business. 

Mae wouldn’t have put up with that, but it’s occurred to her that most people her age don’t have the sort of relationship with their mothers that she does. She doesn’t know how to feel about that. 

Most of their parents are probably old and stupid and think they know better just because they lived through a war and ‘sacrificed for the greater good’. Yeah, right. What greater good? She hasn’t seen much of it, though she knows if she ever said that aloud, Mum would be furious with her. 

“Let’s go to the kitchens,” she says impulsively to Valerie. “I’m starving, and dinner’s not being served for another two hours. Bet you that Briddy and Scotch will make us lemonade if we ask nicely.” 

“Alright,” Valerie says, amiable as ever; that’s what Mae likes about her, she’s very easygoing and laid back compared to the more high-strung Christine and Marian, though she does have a fiery temper when you really tick her off. 

They split off from the courtyard crowds and back indoors, moving towards the center of the castle, and passing through the hall of tapestries, one of which is half-concealing a snogging couple, to Valerie’s vocal disgust. All sorts of people are going out together now. Even Melvyn Taggart got a date last month, and he’s insufferable. No boys have asked her out, but she’s not sure that’s such a bad thing. What would she even do with a boyfriend?

As they pass into the antechamber, Mae takes note of the students pouring down the grand staircase from other exams held on the upper floors of the castle. A few don’t even wait for the stairs to settle back into the floor, leaping down with glee, or messing around on the bannisters until Nearly Headless Nick floats by to tell them off. Somewhere far above, Peeves’ faint cackle can be heard; Mae grimaces. 

She had a run in with him back in April because she stopped a water balloon from being dropped on some first year’s head. It figures the one time she does something out of the goodness of her heart, Peeves takes it as an opportunity to try to vex her incessantly. He’ll have to try a bit harder, though. Mae’s got a lovely adder friend she’d like him to meet; he’s halfway corporeal, a good bite will still sting like hell for him. 

Some of the professors are milling about in the entrance to the great hall, talking to Mr. Nott. Valerie tenses at the sight of him, as does Mae, coming to a momentary halt in the crowded chamber. She doesn’t like any bit of him; not his sharp, pinched, rather rat-like face, she thinks, or his shiny bald head, or his crisp black and green robes. 

“Come on,” Valerie mutters, nudging her as Antony Nott’s gaze briefly passes over them, though he doesn’t seem to immediately recognize either.

“Ugh, what’s he doing here again?” Mae grouses, as they approach the painting that leads into the entrance to the kitchens. 

Valerie shrugs as she tickles the pear and it swings open to reveal the ancient oak doorway. 

“Whatever he’s always here to do. Annoy the professors and spy on everyone for the Minister.”

Mae clamps down on the uneasy jolt she now feels whenever one of her friends refers to Gaunt. 

“Guess you haven’t got a crush on him anymore,” she says awkwardly instead, to cover up her dismay.

Valerie scoffs. “Not bloody likely! He treats muggles like criminals, and muggleborns like- I don’t know, like we’re-,” she makes an agitated noise, gesturing with her hands. “Like we should have to prove ourselves, all the time. You know what I mean?” 

“I suppose,” Mae says, though she doesn’t. Her mother is a witch. And her father is a wizard, as it turns out.

Briddy and Scotch are her and Valerie’s favorite house elves, because they’re really quite spunky, not obsequious or meek, but that does come with some drawbacks; Mae endures an extended lecture on how she should take better care of her very scuffed shoes and fraying ankle socks before they’re set up with some lemonade and gingerbread cookies. 

Mae bites the head off hers, watching as Valerie dips her in her drink.

“That’s disgusting.”

Valerie grins as she swallows. “You think?”

“I know,” Mae snorts. 

“You sound like Christine.”

“Oh, hell, I do, don’t I?” Mae leans back in her stool. The only natural light in the kitchens comes from the high, narrow slotted ground level windows; the rest is from the massive stone hearths and the glowing torches on the walls. Hogwarts’ kitchen still looks a proper medieval one, to her eyes. 

“What are you doing this summer, anyways?”

Valerie shrugs. “Babysitting, probably. I can make loads of money just on my street alone. And maybe my cousin will let me in on his paper route.”

“I wish wizards had paper routes,” Mae complains. “I want to make some money.”

“To buy what with? Candy and pocket knives?” Valerie teases.

Mae flushes; she would like another pocket knife, maybe a utility one, or one that flips into a corkscrew, that sort of thing. “No. I want to buy some more books. Like… poetry,” she decides. 

Everyone is reading poetry now. Some of the older Ravenclaws even host nights for it, so they can read it aloud in their best proper intellectual voices, stroking their chins and probably wishing they had cigarettes on hand.

“Yeah?” Valerie grins. “Do you want a turtleneck and a black beret to go with that poetry, Benson? You could set up in a cafe like all the kids my dad hates, and talk about politics, and nuclear weapons-,”

“Where’s your sense of intellectual curiosity, Faraday?” Mae gives a passable imitation of someone like Hughie Weaver, or worse, Alec Carstairs. “Don’t you want to question? To explore?”

Valerie slurps her lemonade in between her snickers, though she sobers instantly as the door swings open and Professor Finch comes into the kitchens. Mae groans under her breath; did Mum send him to find her? What is it now? 

But he’s looking at Valerie, not her.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, girls,” he says apologetically, waving off the attempts of another house elf to offer him a cup of tea straight from the kettle. “But I’m afraid I need Valerie to come with me.”

Mae frowns. “What do you mean? Sir,” she adds, to sweeten the pot a little, though Finch doesn’t seem aggravated with them, specifically, though something is clearly agitating him. 

“Am I in trouble?” Valerie sounds younger than fourteen for a moment, eyes wide and almost frightened. Finch is usually one of the fun professors, never this grim. 

“Of course not,” he says, “but- well, it’s not really my place to- look, Miss Faraday, if you could follow me, Mr. Nott would like to speak with you.” He says the words like they’re being ground out of him; he clearly doesn’t want to do this.

Mae feels something like cold sweat drip down her back, underneath her rumpled white blouse. “I’m coming too,” she says, defiantly, as Valerie walks over to Finch, brushing crumbs off her skirt with slightly shaky hands. 

To her surprise, Finch doesn’t protest immediately, only leads them out of the now oddly quiet kitchens. The house elves are all watching, silent and almost eerily knowing, though how could they know what is going on?

Finch leads the way back upstairs to the ground floor, and then into the Great Hall, though he holds Mae back just inside the doorway, where a crowd of professors are lined up, some leading more students in. Mae is completely confused, watching Valerie join a crowd ranging from what seems like tiny, terrified first years to irate and gawky fifth years, all milling around. 

They’re from all different houses, though there are relatively few Slytherins present, and within the next few minutes there’s about fifty of them gathered; a few seem like siblings. 

Mae recognizes that Maureen is there, too; she looks on the verge of tears, and takes Valerie’s hand immediately, saying something to her that seems to unnerve Valerie, who pales. Mae recognizes others from the third years as well, though there’s only nine or so of them; there’s more first and second years present than third, fourth, and fifth. 

She sees Jane Ackles, a Hufflepuff, sitting on a bench with her head in her hands, and Ian Garland and Judy Ziskind, two Gryffindors, are arguing fiercely amongst themselves. Roy Morland, the only Slytherin present, is silent and sullen, staring at his shoes, and Robert Barrow seems to be trying to comfort Pat Johnson, who’s trying not to let anyone see his tears. 

Mae feels a sudden sick, swoopy sensation in her stomach. She looks up at Finch, who is gazing on helplessly, then turns her gaze to Professor Witherspoon, whose face is taut with rage. “What’s going on?” she demands. 

“Mae!” 

Mae turns and sees Mum rush in, shoes clacking on the floor; she seems relieved to see Mae back here, an onlooker, not in the middle of the hall like all the rest. 

“Why is she here, Sid?” she demands of Finch, who says quickly, “They didn’t ask for her, she was with Valerie, I didn’t have the heart to send her back to the common room-,”

“What’s going on?” Mae hisses, feeling a surge of fury at being left in the dark. “Mum!”

“I don’t know,” Mum snaps back at her, then seems to regret it. “Just- just come here.” 

Mae steps over to her, and to her surprise, Mum wraps an almost protective arm around her, stepping aside as the crowd of professors parts to reveal Antony Nott, who looks vaguely uncomfortable but otherwise satisfied, an irate Headmaster Dippet, and a thunderous looking Professor Dumbledore, who is arguing with both in low, forceful tones until Nott manages to get past his impressive height, sweeping into the center of the hall. 

Dumbledore seems about to stride after him for a moment, or maybe even hex him, Mae thinks, wildly, but restrains himself, instead snapping something at Dippet, who snaps right back, though she can’t make out what they’re saying over the din. 

Finally, Dippet seems to gather up his dignity, and follow Nott, leaving Dumbledore standing beside Witherspoon and Professor Beery, who seems to be trying to keep the peace, as usual. 

“-a disgrace to the school-,” is all she hears, and then Dumbledore has swept off again, to places unknown. 

“Bugger this,” someone snaps, and Professor Penvenen hurries after him, face red with anger, followed by Professor Morgenstern.

“I’m only staying for the children’s sake,” Witherspoon is muttering to Finch.

Mae stiffens as Professor Carmody finally appears, slipping in. 

Mum tosses her a positively venomous look; Carmody either ignores it or doesn’t catch it, instead leaning beside a wall, arms folded over her chest, lips pursed as she watches the scene before them.

“Whatever happens, keep quiet,” Mum whispers to Mae, tightening her hold on her.

At Dippet’s instruction, all the students gathered have sat down at the empty house tables in neat rows, the youngest in the front, closest to Nott, who seems to be smiling in a grandfatherly manner at them. Most don’t look too convinced of this. The eldest are in the back; they look the most ill at ease. Valerie and Maureen are both somewhere in the middle, sitting side by side.

When Nott speaks, he speaks loud and clear enough for Mae to hear him from here.

“Well,” he says. “I certainly hope you are all pleased to be done with your examinations! We all worked hard, didn’t we?” 

The students are silent and stone-faced; he continues after a moment. “You can all be very proud of yourselves, I’m sure. I know you fortunate you are to be here, how… how very lucky,” he says, tone lightening slightly as if trying to coax a smile here or there, “that you can receive a magical education, as is your right as young witches and wizards! As citizens of the magical world! You must always remember, children, that this is your home. Your place. Where you belong, where you are accepted, and loved… I am sure your teachers care deeply for your wellbeing. As do I.”

Mae glances up at Mum; she looks like she’s going to be as sick as Mae feels.

“With that in mind,” Nott continues, “I am sure you are all aware of the Department of Magical Education, and the very important role it has played this past in year in making sure you are all healthy, safe, and happy. Both in school and at home. Especially at home,” his tone sobers slightly. “Given your… backgrounds, it is crucial that the lessons you receive at home reflect the values you are learning here at school. It is crucial that you are raised in a place where your magic is celebrated, and honored. Where you are safe. And protected from the ignorances and evils of the muggle world.”

There’s a few faint sounds of protest at that, and Headmaster Dippet looks like he wants to say something, but Nott keeps going.

“Now, I know this will not be an easy adjustment for any of you, but over the course of the past year you have all, at some point, been identified as high risk individuals. Meaning that we at the DOME have reason to suspect you are being mistreated at home. Stifled. Neglected.” He pauses for emphasis. “Forced to submit to a life you no longer belong in. You are powerful. You are special, every one of you. Chosen for this world. For this future. So it is in fact my privilege to inform you that every single one of you is being given a chance at a better future, and a proper home.”

A proper home? What the hell does that mean, Mae thinks, and then realizes.

“Mum,” she whispers. “Mum, they’re not- he can’t just- they can’t take them away, can they-,”

Her mother shushes her, shaking her head tightly, but her eyes look red-rimmed.

Several of the first years are now crying openly.

“Tomorrow,” Nott says, “your new foster families will arrive to collect you and your things. Rest assured that they are all good, upstanding citizens, each and every one, and that they- like myself and your teachers- have your very best interests at heart. You’ll be protected and loved by them as if you were their own blood.” 

The emphasis on ‘blood’ is very strong, Mae thinks with dread.

“You can’t do this!” a fourth year Gryffindor girl argues, jumping up from her seat. “You haven’t got the right- my father’s a doctor, you can’t just take me away from him-,”

“My mum’s not a bad person,” Maureen Byrd is trying to be heard over the clamor. “Mister Nott, please, Mister Nott, listen- my mum’s a really good person, actually, she’s not- she’s got a job now, she wrote me, she can take care of me, I promise, she can-,”

“I want to go home,” one of the first years is sobbing. “Please, I’ll be good, I want to go home now-,”

“Your daughter doesn’t need to see this,” Carmody is saying to Mum in a low, curt, voice. “Get her out of here, Benson.”

Mum looks as though she’s about to curse, for an instant, then wrenches Mae away from the crowd of professors- and the distant cries of the students- and stalks out into the antechamber, the doors to the great hall swinging shut with a note of finality behind them. 

She releases Mae then, sounding breathless, as if they’d just run out instead. The antechamber is silent, now. Outside, crowds of students are still rejoicing over the end of exams, laughing and shouting and running by. 

“That- Mae, I-,”

“They can’t do this,” Mae says, furiously. “They can’t- it’s not fair! It’s a load of rubbish, Mum, they can’t just take all those kids away from their parents like that! Can’t you stop them? Can’t Dumbledore? Or Dippet?”

“It’s out of our hands,” Mum says, with a certain sort of loathing in her voice. “An emergency measure was passed two days ago. They’re removing fifty muggleborn students from their parents’ custody. Effective immediately. They waited until the end of the year to do this, to try to make it easier on themselves.”

“You can’t let them take Valerie away,” Mae protests. “Or- or Maureen, Mum, they’re- they’re my friends! You have to talk to Nott, you know him, he’s in MESP with you-,”

“I can’t,” Mum says. “Mae, believe me, I can’t- there’s nothing you or I can do about this right now.”

“Yes, you can! You can- you can tell him, you can convince him, it’s all some misunderstanding, you have to get Valerie off that list, whatever it is-,”

“I can’t,” Mum says. “Mae. Chances are, if I raise a big enough fuss, they would take you away, too.”

Mae stares at her, speechless. 

She is deadly serious, she can tell, her blue eyes watery and her mouth a firm, flat line. 

“They would take you away, too,” Mum says, hoarsely.

“I hate him,” Mae says, under her breath, and then a little louder. “I hate him.” 

She thinks of the letter in her desk drawer, the one from her birthday. 

She decoded it two weeks ago, in a fit of pique one night after finishing a Potions essay. 

She still hasn’t told Mum about it. 

She wants to set it ablaze and feed it to Gaunt, piece by wretched piece, until he chokes to death and his lips melt off. That’s how much she hates him right now. 

“I have to show you something,” she says, in a low, furious tone. “In my room.”

HOGSMEADE, JULY 1960

Tom double checks the time on his pocket watch; it was a wedding gift from his in-laws, as he never had the traditional gift when he came of age. This one is hideously new and shiny; most wizards from the oldest families pride themselves on how ancient and tarnished their watches have become over the years, proof of the longevity of the family name. 

Well, Tom didn’t have a family name until he was eighteen, and as it stands, there are still just two Gaunts; himself and Lydia. Three, if you count his daughter, though he suspects she would rather live in this forest as a feral child then ever take his name. 

Amy would have taken his name. If things had gone as planned, if they’d married. She would have taken it; the Benson surname meant nothing to her, just a convenient placeholder. She might have made some vague fuss over it, but in the end she would have taken his surname happily enough, whether it was Riddle or Gaunt. 

So long as we’re together, she would have said, once. The rest doesn’t matter, so long as we stay together. 

He wonders if Edgar Prince ever had similar conversations with his wife; he doubts it very much. Deirdre Prince and her husband resemble one another so clearly in appearance it might lead one to question if they were already related before marriage. But that’s hardly unique in their circles. 

The Malfoys have always had a tendency to select brides as pale and blonde as them, when they weren’t marrying their own second and third cousins, and the Blacks take it a step further, regularly wedding first cousins, and it’s rumored, back in the old days, the odd uncle to niece, when they were already denounced and persecuted by their muggle neighbors. 

Not that it truly matters. When it came down to it, when Tom paid his little visit, three days after Prince was released (after hours of questioning) by Pike’s office, and one day after several distressingly high profile arrests of a few known Knights of Walpurgis on suspicion of terroristic threats, property damage, and assault (Charles Burke among them, to Tom’s disgust), Prince folded instantly, like wet paper. 

No, he hadn’t so much as breathed Tom’s name during his interrogation. No, they weren’t charging him with any crimes, in exchange for the few names he had given up, just heavy fines. 

No, he didn’t know how much Pike knew. No, he swore Pike had never mentioned Tom’s name, or Abraxas Malfoy’s, or Alexander or Antony Nott’s, or any of the others. No, he wasn’t a spy, of course not, he wasn’t a mole or a plant, but- but- 

And there is always a but, during these things, before Tom has even cast a single curse, even tried to look into an unwilling mind, there is always a desperately hopeful but as they try to slither out from under the stone before it crushes them. 

But- and now he had a confession to make, honest and truthful and seeking mercy- Deirdre, dear, darling, devoted wife Deirdre- well, she’d never liked any of this Walpurgis business, she didn’t understand what it would take to elevate the family name, she was concerned for him, it was a mother’s tenderheartedness, nothing more, no true betrayal- you know, of course, Minister, how these women get, ruled by their hearts and not their minds-

Well, Deirdre had made the acquaintance of some clever young journalist, Skeeter, the woman’s name was, at some baby shower or bridal shower or some society event, and this Skeeter woman had convinced her she could write a glowing article about the Princes’ company, only somewhere along the way she’d begun to pry more, and more, and, well Deirdre had said perhaps more than she ought to about certain things, and- well, certain things had come out. 

Details about the Knights of Walpurgis. Meeting times and dates. Members, both official and ‘unofficial’. Certain money trails. By the time Deirdre understood what was going on here, Prince claims, it was far too late to back out of this little arrangement. 

Tom did not, and does not, believe that for an instant. Those were the desperate words of a man trying to save himself, and his wife. Still, they were valuable words. Now he has a name. Norbrook had already suspected as much, but now he has proof. 

Is he supposed to believe a shrill idiot like Gilda Skeeter came up with this plan to ensnare the Knights of Walpurgis in some conspiracy bust all her own? He doesn’t, for an instant. She has some backer, some supporter egging her on, encouraging her to find a weak link and exploit it.

And she has. 

He’s paid out more money in the past two months to keep mouths shut and bodies out of prison than he has since he was running his actual campaign two years ago. That has been the price of his carelessness, and the Princes’ betrayal. 

He had to bribe no less than seven members of the Wizengamot to reject Pike’s request for multiple other search warrants, he’s had to threaten Henry Rowle to plant a listening device in Pike’s office so Tom is never caught off guard by something like this again, and he had to spend nearly a week working until midnight every week with Norbrook, tidying up loose ends and making absolutely certain any incriminating documents in either of their offices are destroyed, just in case Pike pulls another fast one. 

His patience has all but run out, and was not improved by Prince’s distraught pleading. Strip a man down to his barest parts and you find out what’s at his core. His core was an old, terrified man, begging for the lives of his family. Tom had mercy, made the usual comforting assurances, told Prince he understood, that all could be forgiven, in time, and then Imperiused him. Easier said than done, but he won’t have to deal with it much longer. 

Keeping up an Imperius curse for this long, and at a distance, is extremely taxing on him mentally. As he can’t be there to follow Prince about all day, he has to make contact with him at least every few days to maintain the curse’s full effects, lest he risk it breaking and Prince fleeing. The beauty of the Imperius curse is that it does still allow for some degree of autonomy; it wouldn’t do to tip off the wife, or the daughter.

Besides, it won’t be much longer that he needs Prince in his power. Just another few days. Applewhite’s been instructed to wait and watch carefully for an opportunity. Deirdre Prince and Gilda Skeeter have been regularly meeting for months. They have to meet again soon, and this time, Edgar will be in attendance.

His muddied thoughts are cleared by the creak of a door opening; he chose this shack on the outskirts of the village because he’s had to think a bit smaller, dealing with a child, and it wouldn’t do to overstep and lure her too far away from her mother’s suffocating embrace. It’s like taming a wild creature. He can’t escalate things too quickly, or she’ll panic and run and hide, and then he’ll have to start all over again. If he wants to take a gentler approach, if he wants his daughter to choose him of her own free will, he has to be patient, and accept that it won’t be an easy, straightforward process.

So, the shack. June scouted it out for him months ago, and if Dumbledore appears in the village, suspecting Tom is close by, she’ll run interference long enough for him to avoid any unwanted reunions. He’s not frightened of Dumbledore; he’s not that weak little boy anymore, trembling on the hard cot at Wool’s, watching his wardrobe burn. 

But he is aware that the less time spent in Dumbledore’s proximity, the better. Don’t give him even the slightest opening. He’s perhaps the only wizard in Britain as powerful as Tom, and he’s not nearly as coy about the Unforgivables as he likes to pretend, for all those humble claims that he defeated Grindelwald without any ‘dark’ magic. 

What a load of rubbish. Men like him can only afford to refuse the cup of power because they’ve already drank their fill, decades ago, when the world was young and innocent and ignorant. 

Tom straightens as a petite figure steps over the creaking, rotted wooden floors; there is more greenery inside this ruined cottage than outside it; clinging to the walls and ceiling, moss and leaves and trailing vines. 

Amy is far too fitting here; there’s always been something very unnervingly natural about her, from the way the patchy sunlight through the holes in the roof brings out the dirty blonde highlights of her mousy brown hair, the way her blue eyes gleam, the cluster of her freckles and the way she carries herself, her loose pale green blouse knotted at the waist, her earthy brown trousers cuffed at the ankles to reveal her scuffed workboots.

“Oh,” he says, sure to layer in some disappointment. “I suppose you’ve taken the liberty of reading her mail, too, now? Awfully funny, coming from someone with such… anti-authority sentiments,” he sneers. 

“Don’t play the fool with me,” Amy says in a low, disgusted voice, though he cannot deny the thrill that shoots down his spine at the thought of her willingly coming here, seeking him out. She could have simply ignored his message to Mae, made sure to be well away from the village today, or locked them both up in the castle, like the little princess and her wicked stepmother in one of those hackneyed fairy tales they’d read them at Wool’s. 

He was always bored silly, but Amy would look on with wide, glassy blue eyes, enthralled at the thought of Cinderella escaping her life of drudgery for one night at the ball. Funnily enough, he doesn’t recall the part where Cinderella drugged the prince with a sleeping potion at the stroke of midnight and stole off with the crown jewels.

If there were any parts of those stories he liked, it was the uglier ones, with the nasty, violent endings. Feet and hands chopped off, eyes gouged out, the villain shoved into their own oven or out a window. He liked seeing justice done. It felt right. A fantastic world repaying the wicked in brutality, the hero’s struggles vindicated as they stepped lightly over the blood pooling on the floor and went on their merry way.

He didn’t ask for her to come. He didn’t threaten, or take her here against her will. She came. Of her own, naive accord. Does she really imagine she’s so safe from him? So impervious? That he’s- that what, that he’s burnt himself out on her, and now they can conduct themselves as proper, formal enemies, with nothing lingering beneath the surface?

You’ve Imperiused Prince for weeks now, the little voice in his head, so soft and sibilant, says, suggests. You can do it again. Right here, right now. Or tomorrow. Or the night after that. It would be so easy. You can already see it for yourself, in your mind’s eye. 

The tells that someone has been Imperiused are very minor indeed, far less obvious than a dose of Amortentia. A more subdued, ‘melancholy’ demeanor. The occasional stutter or stammer or lisp when the subconscious tries to fight back. Tremors in the hands, sometimes. 

“I have a right to see my child,” he says, clamping down on the voice. He doesn’t want to listen to it any longer. He knows part of him is afraid of how it might sway him, even a little. Just a bit. It would be so easy. No more fighting. No more back and forth. No more worry, or fear. Just… acceptance. And in time- in time it would not be necessary anymore. It wouldn’t.

“Even if that were true,” she snaps, “you have no right to terrorize us like this.”

“Terrorize you?” he scoffs. “Is that what you call it? Buying her gifts? Writing to her? I am acting as a father should-,”

“You are not her father!” Amy barks. She steps a little further into the room. “You are a stranger to her. Even less than that, Tom. She doesn’t want to know you. And she certainly doesn’t want you to know her.”

“She’s a child,” he snaps, “one raised by you for the past fourteen years, I might add. She doesn’t know what she wants.”

“Right, like how I didn’t know what I wanted, when I was with you,” Amy retorts. “You always liked to think of it that way, didn’t you? I was some ignorant little girl you needed to educate, I needed to be told what I wanted-,”

“Oh, I don’t recall you ever being very shy about letting me know what you wanted,” he all but growls back. 

She flushes, to his satisfaction, then says, “Whatever you think you’re playing at- seeking her attention like this, using it to hurt me- it’s not going to work. That ship sailed long ago, Tom. She will never love you, and she will never respect you. That’s not something money can buy.” Her lip curls, slightly.

“As she loves and respects you?” he mocks. “Merlin, what a little saint you’ve been, the blessed mother herself-,”

“I am here to protect her!”

“From what?” he demands. “From what, Amy?”

“From you, you blind bastard!” Amy looks as if she wants to say something else, then stops herself, before biting out, “I suppose you thought it was very clever of you, timing it just so- pulling all those children from their homes right at the end of term-,”

“I don’t know what that has to do with her-,”

“You think I don’t know a threat when I see one?” Amy asks incredulously. “That I don’t realize that was another one of your little warnings? Messing with other people’s lives just so you can-,”

“This might be hard for you to grasp,” he says, “but not everything my government does pertains to you and our daughter, Amy. I’ve made it quite clear that regardless of my personal feelings-,”

“Everything you do is informed by your personal feelings!” Amy shouts. “At least be man enough to stop pretending otherwise, Tom! You wanted to intimidate me, to frighten her, once again-,”

“I would never hurt her,” he says furiously, taking a step towards her.

Amy pulls her wand. 

“Don’t be foolish, you don’t want to lose it again,” he warns. 

She cocks her head at him in defiance and takes a step backwards, putting more space between them in this moldering room. A bird is chirping just outside; water burbles in the stream running down from the foothills behind the drafty shack. 

“I will always protect her,” Tom says, instead. “Just as I’ve protected those children-,”

“Protected them?” she scoffs, eyes hard, wand unwavering. “You’re kidnapping them, Tom. From their families. So you can pass them off to some childless purebloods to play house with-,”

“Not every family deserves a child! Certainly not a child like us!”

“And who are you to decide that?”

“In her year alone,” he snaps, “shall I tell you? Do you want to know? Robert Barrow, beaten within an inch of his life more than once by his stepfather for being a ‘freak’. Mother a doormat, looking the other way. Derek Auden, orphaned, living in a group home, tormented by the other boys. Maureen Byrd, raised by an erratic single mother who once left her alone for seven hours at the age of six while she was out prostituting herself. Are those the happy muggle families they’re being removed from?”

Amy is silent for a moment, then says, “And what do you think will happen to them, when you’ve packed them off to live with strangers? You know these people, Tom. The ones you surround yourself with. The old families. Do they seem loving to you? Stable?” she presses, sneering. “Does Alexander Nott seem like he’d be a good foster father? What about Castor Mulciber? Oh, wait, scratch him off the fucking list, his nephew murdered him!”

She seems to truly believe it. Tom wonders if perhaps he did misjudge. It might be as simple as it seemed, that no one at Hogwarts had the least thing to do with Mulciber’s death.

“Don’t act as though you’ve any idea how these people conduct themselves in their private lives,” he says. “You made it quite clear a long time how little interest or respect you had for any of it.”

“Respect?” she all but snorts. “Tell me how I should respect the people who think I’m the scum of the earth?”

“Perhaps they wouldn’t have thought that had you not been determined to have a child out of wedlock and raise her in the gutter for eleven years!”

“Stupefy!”

A thin arc of red light collides with the shield that materializes in front of him, wavering in the musty air like a mirage. “I wouldn’t try that again,” he says, tersely.

“Or what?” she goads. “What are you going to do? You’ve had plenty of opportunity, Tom. You’re holding back.” 

She’s more angry than sensible at this moment, he realizes. She’s enraged. She didn’t come here because it was the logical thing to do, she came here because she wanted to scream and rant and rave and vent all her stress and frustrations onto him. 

She came here because she wanted to try to hurt him as much as she feels he’d been hurting her, a thousand pinpricks of the needle over the past two years, none of them crippling or devastating, but agony all the same. 

He can use this. He should use this. She isn’t thinking straight, and she’s being reckless. If he can just raise her hackles against Dumbledore, if he can just redirect some of this, he could- well, he might actually get someone, instead of feeling like an unstoppable force colliding with an immovable object, an endless blow that stretches on and on. 

She’s come close to buckling a few times, but this- he realizes now that her anger might be more useful to him than her fear or her grief. She was never one to sit still and sulk. Anger makes her want to do things. Anger makes her impulsive and restless. 

He just needs to figure out how to-

A floorboard creaks, or a door. Something close by. They are not alone. 

Amy freezes, as does he. She doesn’t lower her wand, but she’s obviously torn between turning so she isn’t ambushed from behind, and a general concern of showing her back to him. 

He’s concerned too, though not about that. Could it be Carmody? He’ll be very, very displeased with her if she’s decided to eavesdrop, but-

“Mae?” Amy asks, the anger flooding from her voice, replaced by something slightly breathless and horrified.

Tom feels the irritation leach from his as well, replaced by something unfamiliar and strange as his daughter shuffles into the room, red in the face from being caught out, her wand white-knuckled in her grip. 

He has been alone with her before, and alone with her mother many times, but never, in fourteen years, have the three of them ever shared the same space, together.

“Mae, stay there,” Amy says, reaching a hand out to Mae, who is just within the doorway. 

The frame is covered with trailing vines, and for an instant it could be a strange portrait, his daughter standing there in a shaft of sunlight from a hole in the roof, shifting from foot to foot, her dark brown hair a slightly warmer hue in the light, her blue eyes bright with anger. 

She’s wearing some ridiculous plaid blouse and a faded pair of capris; her red canvas shoes are covered in dirt from the walk up here, and her bangs are held out of her eyes by a dented clip.

He stares at her for a moment longer; he has not seen her in person in nearly a year, after all, and then feels a surge of anger as Amy slowly moves towards her, wand still raised, as if he were some dangerous beast who had to be held at bay. 

“It was a Caesar cipher,” Mae tells him, flatly. “They’re not that complicated at all, once you know what you’re working with.”

“I knew you’d figure it out,” he says, careful to keep his tone calm and even. If he snaps at her or her mother, he’ll just prove Amy right. He doesn’t want her to see him as an enemy, or a monster. “You’re a very clever girl.”

“I’m fourteen,” Mae snaps. “I’m not some little child to be talked down to.”

For an instant he could be hearing a recording of himself played back to him, and it almost takes his breath away. 

“I know,” he says. “I know you’re not. You’re growing up. And I am very proud of you. Truly.”

“Enough,” says Amy, though her tone is much more subdued now, not brimming with anger. She’s close enough to Mae to touch her, and Tom watches as she angles her body in front of their daughter’s, as if to shield her from view. “Mae, go back outside.”

“You said you weren’t going to do anything stupid!” Mae hisses at her, and Tom almost has to suppress a smile. 

“Mae, go,” Amy says through her teeth, but Mae grabs her arm instead. 

“I’m not leaving you alone with him.”

Fear flashes across Amy’s face. 

And now he sees. Her demeanor completely changes when you bring the child into the mix. Their child. It’s like- it’s almost, absurdly enough, as if they were two ordinary parents fighting bitterly over something, and she was trying to pretend it were all fine and normal, to shield Mae. Not necessarily physically, but emotionally. 

She doesn’t want to raise her voice, she doesn’t want to try to curse him, she doesn’t want to make any sudden moves, because she is afraid of exposing Mae to the two of them together, as if they were some kind of toxic compound that needed to be locked away in a laboratory. 

That, he can use, too. 

Tom takes a step forward.

“Don’t,” Amy says. It reminds him of that night in Edgar's office, when she heard those children outside the door, and suddenly paled with fear, worried of what he might do next. 

Mae is rigid behind her mother, refusing to break eye contact with him, defiantly.

“I understand you’re upset about what happened, at the end of term,” he says. He knows who Mae hangs around. All of them unsuitable, of course, save perhaps Ambrose Bulstrode, but he also knows better than to press that matter right now. In time, she can be steered into calmer waters. “I understand how that must feel, Mae. When your mother and I were your age, we were separated from our friends too, during the evacuation from the city.”

Amy’s eyes say, ‘You never had friends’, but for once she holds her tongue. She seems to hold her tongue quite a bit in front of Mae. How interesting. 

“I know you must be worried for her,” Tom says, “so I’m going to give you her new address, so you can write to one another. Valerie, isn’t that right? Her name is Valerie Faraday?”

“Is she alright?” Mae bursts out, and brushes past her mother, though Amy keeps a hand on her shoulder, her gaze riveted to Tom- what are you playing at, he can all but hear her thinking.

“They haven’t hurt her, right?” Mae demands. She is close enough to him now that he could put a hand on her shoulder as well. Fourteen years, and he’s never been able to lay a hand on his own child. Never embrace her, or walk her across a busy street, her small hand in his. She never sat in his lap when she was small, telling him about her day at school, she never rode on his shoulders at a carnival or fair, and she never threw her arms around his legs as a toddler. 

“Of course not,” Tom says. “No- Mae, no one is going to hurt her. In time, you’ll see she is better off with people who can understand her, who aren’t afraid or ashamed of her-,”

She goes very red. “That’s not true! Valerie’s parents aren’t ashamed of her-,”

“Even friends sometimes keep secrets,” he says, reassuringly, but hands her a slip of paper. 

Amy stiffens, but it’s just an address. 

Mae almost crumples it in her palm, then shoves it in her pocket and seems to realize how close they all are to one another, like a normal family, and breaks away. Tom smiles at her, but she avoids his gaze now, staring at the floorboards for a moment, before she says, “Mum, come on, let’s go.” She’s back in the doorframe, half turned from them as if to collect herself.

“Stay away,” Amy says to him, voice barely above a whisper.

Tom’s smile vanishes; Mae isn’t looking. He takes Amy's warm hand with spiteful fondness; when their fingers lace together Amy jerks away as if stung, but he holds it for a moment before it can become a struggle, then lets go. She looks revolted. He feels a stab of triumph. 

“Valerie is staying with my good friends the Notts,” Tom says, loud and clear. “You can send her letters to me, Mae, and I’ll make sure they get to her in private.”

“How stupid do you think I am?” Mae snaps, looking back at him venomously. “You’re lying.”

“I won’t read them,” he says. “I want to help you. I know what it’s like to lose a friend.”

“Tom, stop it,” Amy mutters; she sounds horrified. 

“You’re lying,” Mae repeats herself, shaking her head. “This is some trick.”

“No trick. Shall I swear an Unbreakable Vow?” He’s only half joking.

Mae stares at him, brow furrowed. “You don’t want to help me,” she says slowly.

“I’m your father.”

“You’re sick,” she spits, voice cracking slightly, and then runs out. Teenage melodramatics. He’ll have to get used to this sort of thing. Screaming and crying and slamming doors and eye rolls. 

For an instant, that leaves him and Amy.

“You think,” she says, barely above a whisper, “that this is you winning. I have news for you. It’s not. You have no idea.”

“Oh,” he says, smiling banally down at her. “I very much disagree with that assessment.” She is close enough that he could bend down slightly and kiss her. He can smell her perfume. 

She seems to sense this and jerks away, her stride not breaking, almost hastening, as if worried he might drag her back at any moment. He lets her go. Again. 

But it’s not for very long, he reminds himself. Mae will come back to him. She will. Just as she still came today. Either out of concern for her mother, curiosity, or a desire for revenge. He’s not very picky about which one it is. So long as she returns to him. 

And she will.

When he gets home that evening, tired but satisfied with this day’s events, Lydia tells him that Applewhite dropped by with a message. 

“How did he seem?” he asks her. Michael wears his emotions on his sleeve, like most Gryffindors.

“Tired,” she says, glancing up from her sewing. Her brother’s wife is pregnant again, supposedly. And God forbid any pureblood child receive hand-me-down baby socks. Lydia watches him almost reproachfully as he reads it. 

Melted down the silver and the gold. 

He sets it back down, the picks up the Daily Prophet from today, constantly updating with new developments. 

FIRE AT REPORTER’S HOME LEAVES THREE DEAD, the latest headline reads. AUTHORITIES QUESTIONING NEIGHBORS, STRUGGLING TO IDENTIFY THE DECEASED. PROPHET’S OWN GILDA SKEETER FEARED KILLED IN TRAGIC BLAZE. 

Tom smiles, and tosses it back down onto the coffee table, loosening his tie as he moves towards the stairs. 

“How do you feel about going out for dinner tonight?” he asks lightly, his hand on the banister. “It’s been a while since we treated ourselves.”

“Where?” her voice is low and wary. 

“Babylon Park,” he says, on a whim. “We can get seats just where you like, by the band.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. This fic is going to be on the backburner for a bit while I try to wrap up Haunt/Hunt. It's not going on hiatus, but updates will probably be more like every 2 weeks, as opposed to every week. I feel like I'll be able to focus better on it when Haunt/Hunt is finished anyways because I won't be trying to write two long running, plot-heavy stories at the same time.
> 
> 2\. I feel like this chapter might have been very confusing so just for clarification: Nott and company have not removed every single muggleborn student at Hogwarts from their parents' custody, but they have removed a significant portion of them, at least 50 kids. As Mae notes, most of these kids seem to be younger students, as opposed to older. They are not being pulled out of Hogwarts, but instead of being sent home for the summer like everyone else, they're being shipped out to Ministry-approved (ie. almost entirely wealthy pureblooded) foster families for the foreseeable future. This policy will also effect the incoming first years for the fall of 1960.
> 
> 3\. I didn't want it to be like 'two steps forward, one step back' with Mae once again hiding things from Amy, so she does (belatedly) show her the coded message Tom sent her several months ago, which sets up Amy's interaction with Tom, who was hoping Mae would be tempted enough to sneak out to meet him by herself. (Though he clearly isn't too upset Amy showed instead). 
> 
> 4\. We found out last chapter that the Aurors Office got a tip-off, raided the Prince home, and took Edgar Prince into custody a few months ago. As it turns out, Edgar's wife Deirdre had been secretly meeting with aspiring intrepid reporter Gilda Skeeter, who was working in conjunction with Dumbledore and Irene Greengrass to try to take Tom and the KoW out with a damning expose of evidence in the Prophet. Unfortunately, the raid by the Aurors backfired in that it also alerted Tom, who wasted no time in going into damage control mode, and interrogated and Imperiused Edgar. 
> 
> 5\. We never really get in-depth explanation of the mechanics of an Imperius curse in the canon books, so I'm probably playing fast and loose with the magic here. Basically Tom is a powerful enough wizard that he can keep Edgar under his control even from a great distance and over time, so long as he 'updates' the curse every so often. He uses this to set-up a trap by using the mind-controlled Edgar (with some help from everyone's least favorite magical hitman, Applewhite), which we see pay off at the end of this chapter. This was still risky, since it is *possible* to break free from an Imperius curse, albeit unlikely unless you are very powerful magically, or if you happen to have an extremely strong sense of self. 
> 
> 6\. I wanted to finally show Mae and Amy together through Tom's eyes, and it's pretty crazy that at Chapter 39, this is the first time all three of them have been in the same space together, interacting. Tom realizes two things he probably could have picked up on much earlier were he not an arrogant asshole: 1. that getting Amy really, really angry as opposed to just scared might be a surefire way to get her to act recklessly and to seek him out, as opposed to the other way around and 2. that in Mae's presence, Amy is inhibited and restraining herself, because she still wants to protect Mae's innocence and not 'expose' her to the toxic sludge that is him and Amy together. So while an angry Amy might be impulsive enough to run right into a trap, an Amy-around-her-child is a lot more compliant because she's terrified of what Tom might say or do in front of their daughter.
> 
> 7\. Tom didn't make up that information about some of those muggleborn children's negligent or abusive parents; that's true. But as Amy points out, they are not necessarily guaranteed a safe and happy upbringing with the likes of many of these pureblood families, besides the trauma of being unexpectedly taken from their parents, siblings, and life-long homes with no promise of reunion. Tom is also fully capable of blatantly using Mae's distress over Valerie to try to get closer to his daughter, by making her dependent on him for communication with one of her best friends. 
> 
> 8\. And only Tom would be suggest going out for dinner and live music after successfully having three people murdered. Fortunately, we won't have to put up with his shit next chapter, because it will be primarily from Lydia's POV, as she relives some not-so-pleasant childhood memories and visits her dear aunt Tess.


	40. Lydia VIII - Amy XVIII

NORTH YORKSHIRE, AUGUST 1960

“Did you spend very much time here, as a girl?” 

Tom’s tone is light and conversational as they stand there in the gravel drive. Once carriages might have trundled along it up to the coarse sandstone estate, halfway between a manor house and a castle, really. 

It’s not as though witches and wizards have ever needed them to travel, but when she was little Lyle would tell her how once they all lived like kings and queens in grand old castles while muggles toiled in their fields, and all their carriages were gilded and enameled and drawn by thestrals or unicorns or pegasi, and the people would fall to their knees and shield their eyes at the sight, they were so beautiful, so wondrous. 

The Nott estate puts the Rosier home to shame; this was constructed sometime in the 1300s, whereas Lydia’s birthplace is about two centuries younger. All the same, the old families only compare notes and cluck their tongues over these sort of things come Yule. Who came over from France first. Who fought for what king, when there were still knight-enchanters and sorcerers serving at court and muggle kings took witches for mistresses and sired queerly powerful bastard children on them. 

Who had what titles and what lands, before the Statute stripped most of that away, removed them entirely from the aristocracy. No more lords, no more ladies, no counts, no dukes, no knighthoods. The Ministry almost tore itself apart over it at the time, the outrage was so great. But the threat of extermination was greater. The muggles were in the midst of their Enlightenment. 

They could no longer be dismissed as semi-intelligent animals, crude beings who were only a threat when they gathered in packs. No, now they were building machinery, exploring the sciences, killing each other more effectively. Organizing life and death in ways that had only ever been the domain of wizards beforehand. 

“Sometimes,” says Lydia. It’s a muggy August afternoon, fresh off a rainstorm, the ornamental lakes and streams that populate the hilly lands bloated and grey-green. “Well, quite a bit of time, now that I think on it. I think my aunt felt my education would go more smoothly without my parents hovering in the background.” 

Hovering, yes. The occasional timid question or bored comment. Are you sure about this, Therese? Surely the girl could go to school like her brother. They’ll think she’s deformed in some way if we hold her at home forever. How am I supposed to get a match for her in ten years, if society’s never laid eyes on her? 

“Still,” says Tom. “I imagine it would have been lonely. Did they make you spend the nights with them, too?”

“I had a bedroom here,” Lydia says, vaguely. She does not like to think of that room; she does not like to think of this place much at all, truly, and hasn’t been here in several years, since before her wedding. 

In the bloom of her engagement to Tom it was easy to make herself forget, she was so giddy for the future. She was a child, envisioning a thousand wrapped presents piled up just for her, so much power to play with. How much of that has she seen? Little and less. Occasionally he has her put on another face for him, go out and talk to people, report back. As if she were just another one of his people. 

“I suppose you never saw much of Alex, what with him off at a school.” 

Alexander Nott, who is approximately Tom’s age, is her uncle Antony’s younger cousin. His father was Adrian Nott, who wed some frail Lestrange girl, who proceeded to die birthing poor sullen Alex, and the father drank himself to death within the year. Tony and Tess, of course, expected to be granted custody of the boy. 

Alas. The girl’s own parents scooped up the child the Notts might have raised as their own son, until they both succumbed to old age somewhere around when Lydia was seven or so, and Alexander fourteen. By then he was three years from his majority, had little interest in a familial relation with his father’s cousin, and had other properties willed to him to attend to. 

So he was seldom around, if ever. Not that Lydia could complain of it. There was some noise back in the day from her uncle about wedding the two of them, and she knows Alexander Nott well enough now. He would not be to her liking in the least. Not at all. 

The grand doors are flung open, presumably to air out the house; Lydia knows from experience it gets dreadfully stuffy in the summers. There’s the sharp clack of heels, and then her aunt is crunching across the gravel to them, unruffled and undisturbed despite this visit being quite last minute. Tom is restless and wants a talk with Antony about ‘some business’. 

Lydia thinks ‘some business’ might have to do with the fact that Skeeter woman nearly caught them with their pants down, so to speak, and it was a much closer call than Tom will admit. Had genuine, damning evidence made it into print they would be, as Lyle might put it while inebriated, ‘fucked senseless’. 

Tom’s been on a purge since May, doing house calls here and there, making sure no one has anything that could be used against him if there’s an unexpected auror raid. 

Henry Rowle just announced his engagement to the head auror’s daughter, though, so there’s that settled. Lydia quite likes Henry, as far as dimwitted brutes go, and thinks it a shame that he could never quite get free of Tom’s talons, but the fiancee seems a sweet girl; Lydia’s met her a few times when supervising documents being filed in the Ministry archives. She always forgets her name, though. Noreen? No, Doreen. 

Well, if anything were liable to make Pike tread lightly, that would be it. Tom would never be so gauche as to directly threaten a man’s daughter himself, but this is a more elegant means of warning. 

Pike has no family save her, and she is quite besotted with Rowle. Does he want to ruin his child’s life? Does he want a total estrangement by cruelly persecuting her beloved’s innocent friends and family? No? Well, then he’d best think twice. 

“Darling,” Tess kisses her on the cheek, then Tom, squeezing his hand as fondly as if she were his own mother. She needn’t bother. Tom is unlike most men who grew up without a father in that he does not silently crave older men’s approval and reassurances. 

And he is unlike most men who grew up without a mother in that he is not looking for a pat on the head and a cup of warm milk before bed. Or perhaps that’s what he gets when he visits a whorehouse, they simply tuck him to bed and hold him while he falls asleep.

The thought makes a snicker grate in her throat but of course she doesn’t let it escape. Tom will stand for quite a bit compared to the men she grew up around, often intrigued rather than outraged when challenged by a woman, but he has always delineated very sharply between a bit of charming provocation and outright mockery. And mockery he will not have, not ever. 

“Antony is finishing up some paperwork in his study,” Therese tells Tom. “But of course you know your way, don’t you, from your last visit?”

Lydia wonders how often he’s been over here without her, and asks Tess as much after he’s gon as they step into the darkened foyer, always in that looming square shadow of the stairwell leading up to the second floor. This wing of the house only has two floors; the south wing has three, though, with the squat slate-roofed tower in the middle. 

“Oh, a few times- he never stays for dinner, can’t wait to get home to you, I should think.” 

Tess loops her arm with Lydia’s, as if they were girls the same age. The first time she did this was when Lydia had come of age and they took a tour across Europe; it was a sign of respect and affection, a reward for years of training well-concluded. 

There was no such affection when Lydia was a child. If Therese wanted to walk with her, she expected Lydia to follow closely behind, or she tugged her along herself, her nails making crescent indents in the soft skin of Lydia’s skinny child’s wrist. 

As they pass into the parlor, Lydia has a sudden flash of how this rug under her adult feet- this very rug- once bunched up and tangled as she fought viciously to wrench herself away from her aunt, cursing and screaming like a wild creature. Her nails turned to claws, raking open Therese’s skirt, and her toes gnarled into talons in her slippers. Passing a mirror, Lydia had caught a glimpse of herself in her reflection, and almost laughed despite her rage, because she looked like a beast, her eyebrows bursting into feline feathery tufts, her pupils almost slitted, her irises bright yellow. 

There are no wild beasts in the parlor now. Just Lydia, her beloved aunt, and the little girl that is now their ward. The girl is perhaps thirteen or fourteen, Lydia thinks, freckled and tall for her age, almost coltish with long limbs and a long face.

Despite that, she’s not an ugly child; her hair is a rich dark auburn that pairs pleasingly with her aunt and her own red gold, and her eyes are an attractive shade of hazel. No spots or pimples, either, though she does sit a bit like a boy. 

“Valerie, a lady crosses her ankles and sits up straight,” Therese reminds the girl, who reluctantly obeys, though she is staring at Lydia as if she knows her. “This is Mrs. Gaunt, my niece. Stand up now.”

Valerie almost trips as she scrambles to her feet, but keeps her balance. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Gaunt,” she says. 

She doesn’t have the countenance of a shy or even sullen child, but of a child that is used to being much more boisterous and loud than this; slightly hunched and withdrawn, as it were, to keep from overextending herself and provoking ire.

“You must call me Lydia, darling,” says Lydia. “After all, we’re practically family now, aren’t we?” 

Rather than across from the girl, she sits down beside her, as Tess rings a bell for a house elf. 

Valerie still starts a little when one of elves appears with a soft pop in the room; Moggy, Lydia thinks this one is. The elves here go in terror of her aunt, they make Lydia’s own mother look like a saint, but they were always kind to Lydia. Or as kind as they could be. 

“Earl Grey,” says Tess, “and smoked salmon sandwiches, our Lydia needs to keep her strength up, she eats like a bird, the Minister’s wife never gets a moment’s rest.” 

Again, Lydia can’t tell if she is teasing, goading, or not. Look at my new dolly. This one is called Valerie, and she is ever so much more amenable than you were, wretched, ungrateful child. She keeps her skin on like a proper lady, and she never hisses and spits. 

“And the scones from this morning, with some clotted cream.” She looks at Valerie, smiles indulgently, flushed with the honeymoon of new parenthood. “And the fruit tart. I recall you quite liked that, dear.”

Valerie smiles back, though Lydia can tell it is not her proper grin, but the polite smile children reserve for official type appointments and strict teachers. “Yes,” she says. That is all. 

Therese arches an eyebrow a shade darker than her hair, expectantly. “Yes, please,” corrects Valerie. She glances furtively at Lydia, who smiles brightly, consolingly, in an ‘oh, I’m not a stuffy grownup like the rest of them’ manner. 

They sip tea and Lydia watches the girl break off crumbs from her scone until it’s entirely dissected while her aunt talks. 

Faraday, is the surname by birth, but under this roof of course she is a loved and treasured part of the family, and fortunately Valerie is not nearly as crude as some of these names ‘those people’ give their children. Valerie Nott is acceptable; a nice, classical name. 

Valerie comes from Essex, but they’re working hard to get rid of that nasty accent, aren’t they? 

And here is ever so much nicer than that hovel she grew up, crammed in a tiny bedroom with two ungrateful, spiteful sisters, forced to hide her magic, her true self, for the comfort of her muggle family. Here Valerie has a bedroom all her own, with a four poster bed with drapings and a beautiful view of the lake and gardens. 

She has a wardrobe full of new clothes; at Therese’s insistence she stands, brushing crumbs from her mouth, to show off one of her new dresses. In muggle company, Lydia is bemusedly aware, because she keeps up with fashion, this would be considered an outfit for a costume party, grandmotherly, fifty years in the past.

A knee length dark green dressed trimmed with lace, buttoned up boots over stockings that must be sweltering in this heat. Hair that might have been before confined to a modern ponytail now spills down over the shoulders, adorned with a matching ribbon.

After a perfunctory twirl, Valerie is allowed to sit back down again, but then must get back up and smooth her skirt properly. 

“Beautiful,” says Lydia. “You’ll be a beautiful young woman someday, Valerie. I wish I had that height. Like a fashion model.”

Valerie colors, not prettily but ruddily. 

“And a Ravenclaw,” Tess says, approvingly. “We could not have been luckier. Brains as well as beauty, isn’t that right, Valerie?”

Valerie smiles again, stiffly, with a little nod. 

“Well,” Lydia says, leaning forward conspiratorially, “you shall have to think of me as cousin, and I would love for us to be great friends. I could take you out, some weekend or another, and we could go shopping for your school things. You’ll be needing a new uniform this year, I expect?”

“I’m going to be a fourth year,” says Valerie. It is said with unadulterated longing; she obviously can’t wait to be back at school, temporarily out of Therese’s grasp. 

Lydia wonders if dear Tess would like nothing better than to tutor Valerie at home these next few years, but of course Tom would never allow such thing. There’s been considerable pushback as it is, and he’s actively campaigning against homeschooling already. Next on the docket is a bill of law making attendance at Hogwarts mandatory. 

After tea, Tom has disappeared off for a walk with her uncle, and Therese is distracted by the arrival of an owl; the Blacks want them for dinner this weekend, so they can show off their growing brood. No unfortunate little wards for them, oh no, they have their hands quite full. 

Bella is nine now, though Lydia can scarcely believe it of her, tall for her age, and a willful little terror. Andromeda is quiet and reticent in comparison, her nose shoved in some book when she’s not arguing with her older sister. And darling little Cissy is five, no longer a toddling babe but a perfect little sprite of a girl, with hair like cornsilk. 

But what’s more, what Wally really wants to show off, is her son. She has one, and Cygnus does not. Aunt Druella must be in a proper state; Lydia can hear Cygnus roaring now about his rights, how it should be his, but unless his wife can provide a male heir in the future, it’s all slated to go to Walburga’s precious son, Sirius, born last November. 

Lydia has met the infant twice; he’s a hearty little thing, with a full head of black hair and startling grey eyes, though they may darken as he ages. 

She didn’t mind holding him, despite see little appeal in it, but what did sour her was all the condescending glances. 

Oh, if only you could have one of your own, Lydia… And how has Tom’s health been? And yours? Are you getting enough sleep? Eating well? He doesn’t work too much, does he? It’s important to find time for each other. 

And her mother and aunts, taking her aside to recommend this potion or that charm, all designed to promote fertility and ‘strengthen her womb’, as if it were a muscle of its own, just waiting to be put to bloody use. 

“If Cecily has a boy,” Tess says, “they would be such dear friends, him and Sirius. I’ve been speaking to your mother about names. She is quite insistent on Lucien, for your grandfather.”

“Better than Gilbert,” Lydia says dryly. 

Valerie suppresses a snort. 

Tess retreats upstairs to reply, leaving Lydia with Valerie in the parlor, that has not changed at since she was a girl of five or six in the year 1940, and which has retained the same white-washed, pale Georgian-esque trappings that it had in the year 1840. There are potted ferns in the great hearth, ruffled by an invisible breeze from time to time. 

“We shall go down for a walk of our own,” Lydia decides, because Therese will be busy for at least another twenty minutes with her reply, and will be too proud to go hurrying after them if she comes down to find them missing, that is not the way of a lady, a lady never hurries or provokes a fuss. “Have you been to the bridge yet?”

She has not. 

Lydia leads the child out of the house, through the lush, trellised gardens in the back, and down to the black stream that feeds into the ornamental lakes. To her surprise, she finds herself keeping a faster pace in her pencil skirt than the twiggy Valerie is in her dress and boots. “They hurt your feet,” she says, throwing a glance over her shoulder at the girl.

She gets a flushed nod in response.

The bridge is a crude wooden construction across the widest part of the stream, beginning to rot in some places, flanked by drooping willow trees. 

“I used to hide down here when I was young,” says Lydia, as she leans against the rail. Valerie is a few feet from her, still eying her warily. “To get away from Her,” she adds, with the right inflection. Not quite contemptuous, but close.

Valerie still keeps mum, obviously suspecting this is some sort of ploy, or trap.

“My parents didn’t know what to do with me, either,” Lydia adds, and that springs it.

“My parents love me,” Valerie snaps. “They would- they would never want to give me up, and no one will even let me write to them, or- or visit!”

Lydia regards her for a moment, then says, “It’s not that they won’t let you, Valerie, but even if you did, do you think they would remember you?”

The girl stares at her in horror. “What are you talking about?”

Lydia lets her come to the conclusion herself. She’s going into her fourth year, she must have some knowledge of what a memory charm is by now, she doesn’t seem that simple.

In response, Valerie kicks the rotting wooden post of the rail, then slams both palms against it, until she comes away with a yelp of pain and a splinter. 

I’m the reason why you’re here, Lydia thinks. Mostly Tom, but partly me as well. I pushed for this. I made this my cause. She does not regret it, not quite. The child is clearly unhappy, but chances are she was not much more happier at home with her muggle family. What sort of life would that be? One foot in the magical, one in the mundane? 

Her parents would always regard her with private fear and suspicion. Her siblings would resent her. Especially sisters. How to explain to them while in their world, a woman cannot open a line of credit or take a job without her husband’s permission, in another world, the Minister before this one was a woman?

But she does regret that Valerie is here, of all places. She’s not a monster. She’s not unfeeling. This is not a place for a child to grow up. 

She swallows around a jagged shard in her throat, then says, “I’m going to give you some advice. My aunt wants to be loved and feared in equal measure. Appeal to that, don’t defy her, and it will be smooth sailing. My uncle just wants respect and gratitude. Get in his good graces and even if you rile her up, it will go much easier for you.”

“Are they going to hurt me?” It comes out in a child’s creaking voice of terror.

“Therese would never hit without cause, and you’re too old for a spanking,” says Lydia. “But I wouldn’t advise getting smart, or breaking anything. Where is your wand?”

Valerie looks down, at the stream rushing along beneath them. “Locked up.”

“I thought as much. If you want to see it again, you’ll play along.”

“Did they do that to you?”

Lydia turns her face towards the breeze rustling through the trees. “No. I didn’t get my wand until I was your age.”

“Why?” Valerie sounds more befuddled than horrified.

“Because I was a very willful and sickly child, and my aunt convinced my parents I would not do well at all at school. So she educated me. And I didn’t get a wand until she was convinced I could handle one.”

Despite the fact that this girl must hate her, she can feel the pitying look thrown her way. “That’s not right.”

“Well, it was a very long time ago, now. That won’t be allowed to happen anymore.”

“I want to go home,” Valerie says, raggedly. “You’re married to the Minister. Mr. Gaunt. You have to tell him that this is a mistake, that I- I was happy at home, with my parents. I was safe. No one was going to hurt me, or- or expose the magical world. My parents followed the rules. You have to tell him to send me back.”

“Well,” says Lydia. “You could always tell him yourself.” She shades her eyes with a gloved hand, spotting two dark figures on the horizon. “There they are.”

But by the time Tom and Antony have spotted them and made their way over, Valerie is running back up to the house, no doubt getting mud all over those spotless leather boots. Lydia leans against the bridge in an unladylike fashion; a bullfrog is croaking in the reeds, happy as can be. 

She watches Tom’s outline draw closer and closer, like a mirage moving down the green-grey hillside. How old and frail her uncle suddenly seems beside him, in the prime of his life. And her in the prime of hers. 

What does she have to show for it? Lydia straightens up, adjusting her hat. It’s a funny sort of beast, anger. She had not realized how long it had been slumbering, coiled up inside her, until she came here today, and something in the air, something in the water, coaxed it all back to life. 

Now it’s roaring through her veins. She feels her nails lengthen, sharpen, inside her dainty gloves, but coaxes them back, massaging her fingers. 

Not now, she thinks, but oh, someday soon. 

HOGWARTS, AUGUST 1960

She’s in the in-between zone between waking and sleeping; her body feels warmed by a summer breeze seeping through the window of her bedroom, but her mind is convinced it’s the heat of a small fire lit up in a crumbling hearth, which she and Frank Shelby huddle around for warmth. 

She’s healed his serious wounds, but he still moves stiffly, and he has not said a word since he saw her spark the wet brush to flames with a jab of her wand.

Finally, she says, “Do you know where you are?”

“A village somewhere in between Lille and Metz,” he says, without looking away from the charmed, wavering flames. “My unit was sent to investigate reports of escaped German POWs hiding here.”

“Did you find them?”

“They’re those things,” he shudders, or shivers, she can’t tell.

“Did that happen to the rest of your unit, too?”

“I don’t know. I thought I was going to die. I thought she’d kill me straight off.” He licks his cracked lips. “I tried to reason with her.”

“And then?”

“And then I bloody well tried to shoot her, didn’t ?”

Amy has to laugh at that. Then he does look at her, wary and frightened and curious, all the same.

“What I want to know,” he says, “is where the fuck you came from. You’re as English as me. You don’t look like a nurse. Who’s your commanding officer? Are you some special forces or something?” His brow knits together and for a moment he looks like a little boy, though he can’t be much older than twenty. “Are you some kind of spy?”

“I’m not a spy,” she says, considering her next words as her breath mists in front of her. Her hands are wedged between her thighs to keep them warm. “I am a nurse, of sorts. But not with your army, alright? I came here with other people. To help clean up after another war.”

“I should be home by now,” he says, bitterly. “It’s over and done with. Hitler’s dead. They’re all fucking dead. What month is it?”

“November 1945,” she says, uncomfortable.

He curses, slowly. “My family must think I’m dead.”

“I’m sorry.” She is sorry. He didn’t deserve to be caught up in any of this. Wrong place, wrong time. Just like everyone else in war. Nearly everyone. Her in the East End, while those bombs were falling. Whoops. So sorry. 

“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “Just tell me who the fuck you are and how you mean for us to get out of here. I can fight. But I have to know where we’re going.”

“My name’s Amy,” she says. “Amy Benson. I’m a healer with the Ministry of Magic, like I told you before.”

He stares at her dully, then scoffs. “You’re having me on.”

“I am not,” she says, holding her wand out for him to see. “I’m a witch. A magician. Whatever you want to call it. I can do magic. Spells and charms, and… and other things.”

He shakes his head. “You’re not a witch, a witch is a- I don’t know. Like her. The woman. Is she a witch? I could believe that.”

“She is,” says Amy. “A powerful one. They used to call her the Corpse Queen of Kiev.”

“Ah,” he chuckles in disbelief, “we’ll we’re a long way from fucking Kiev, aren’t we? Are you telling me Stalin’s got witches working for him? Bringing back the dead?”

“She never worked for Stalin,” Amy says, “she worked for a sorcerer called Grindelwald.”

“You’re mad, aren’t you?” he comments. “My God. I’m sitting in a shack in the middle of some hell with a madwoman. Am I dead?”

“No,” she snorts. “Her name is Marya Berezhna. You’ve been fighting this war, we’ve had one of our own against a man called Grindelwald and his armies.”

“What is he supposed to be, some magical bloody Nazi?”

“Something like that. He wanted to take over Europe and have it ruled by wizards and witches. To stamp out muggles- ordinary people. Like you. He’s dead now, though. But his people are still out there.”

“People like me?” he says in disbelief. “You’re serious. You really mean this. You’re telling me you’re a witch.”

“How do you think I healed you? With my bare hands?”

“I don’t know,” Frank Shelby smiles, mirthless, “I suppose I was still hoping for a miracle.”

The fire crackles and pops, and Amy wakes in the midst of a late morning in August, her room as stuffy as a greenhouse. Frank and the fire and the cold are a world and a decade away from her, and for an instant her chest is tight with longing. For what, she doesn’t know. The world Frank Shelby lived in, maybe. 

But that is not the world she lives in.

Annoyed with herself for sleeping in so late, even if it is the weekend, she showers and dresses quickly, then looks out on Mae, who is lying out in the garden in a hammock Vera sent them a few weeks ago, reading, probably developing a nasty sunburn on the pale white legs sticking out of the end of it, her book propped up on her chest. 

Amy spends much of the next hour trying to finish editing a paper she’s been working on for MESP about the potential side effects of a new variation of sleeping potions, before giving up on that the second time she almost breaks a quill. 

She has no reason to be this upset. She hasn’t seen or heard anything from Tom since last month, and despite her lingering fears, she doesn’t feel unsafe in her own home. But she does feel- is impotent the word for it? 

She feels angry, and useless, and frustrated, all of which are familiar feelings to her, only now she means to do something about them. She’s tired. She’s tired of waiting for every other peace on the proverbial chess board to move first, and she’s tired of waiting on Dumbledore’s directives. 

What has he had them do, since the news erupted that Gilda Skeeter was dead in a ‘tragic accidental fire’, along with the Princes? That Eileen Prince was missing, nowhere to be found in magical Britain? That Irene Greengrass just got the entire case against Tom she was building, swept out from under her? 

Nothing. He didn’t specifically say ‘we do nothing’, but that’s what is has boiled down to. The same song-and-dance since the Christmas before last, when they heard that absurd prophecy. Watch and wait. 

Is that honestly what he intends to do? Watch and wait for some prophesied hero? Wait for Tom to trip over his own feet and incriminate himself? Wait for his popularity to ebb away, for his government to go too far and lose support, as if taking children from their parents wasn’t far enough?

Well, they’ve watched, and they’ve waited, and they’ve been cautious, and it’s amounted to nothing. He is winning. He is winning and all but rubbing it in their faces with greedy hands. 

He has made it perfectly clear that if he wants a law passed, he’ll brute force it through, and if he wants someone out of his way, he’ll have them killed, and if he wants to- if he wants to be around Mae, well, there he is, and there’s nothing Amy can do about it, no recourse, no defence.

She still has the ring, and she’s got no fucking idea what to do with it. Destroy it, if it will weaken him, somehow? Then she no longer has it to bargain with. Let him know she passed off a fake? And what, hear about him having Jaime Isola smothered in his cell? 

She has two things he cares about: the horcrux, and Mae, and neither of them she can truly use against him without hurting herself as well. That is a well-sprung trap. 

They are not on even ground. It’s like how she thought when they were kids, that old game of chicken. He will win every time, because there is nothing he wouldn’t sacrifice to have his way, to win the match. No risk he wouldn’t take. She can’t play that game with him anymore; she was never made for it. 

So that’s not the game she beat him at last time. The game she beat him at last time wasn’t pushing them both over the edge, it was getting him to underestimate her, which wasn’t as hard as she’d hoped it might be. 

This time there is no trust. He might not want her dead, he might even still feel some attraction to her, in a sick, possessive, self-absorbed sort of way, but that doesn’t mean he trusts her, or likes her, or has any affection for her in the least. She is not going to worm her way back into his good graces.

But she doesn’t need his trust, or his love. She just needs to excel at something that he never could. And that, simply put, is potions. It sounds trite and silly, but it’s true. She could never outduel him or out-strategize him but she could always, always, outbrew him. 

So she goes into her cellar, pops open one of the locked trunks stacked in a dusty corner, and pulls out a bottle that’s been kept carefully stored and cooled since the December of 1957. 

Veritaserum can keep, so long as it’s properly stored, for up to fourteen years, so this batch should still be good. She shakes the bottle, watching bubbles form and disappear, then goes to look for a vial. 

Two hours later, she sets it down on Dumbledore’s desk with a quiet tap, then sits down on the other side, studying him as he studies her.

“I can’t wait any longer,” Amy says. “Not for him to keep this up. And you might think me selfish, but my daughter is always going to come before any plans of yours. No matter how longstanding. I can’t sit by and be patient. We tried it your way.”

“We did,” he acknowledges. “I confess I have not been as… proactive as I might have been, thirty years ago. Before the war.”

It always comes back to the war, doesn’t it? Amy frowns. “You’re afraid of another one? He’s no Grindelwald.”

There is a slight tension, tautness, in Dumbledore, at the sound at that name. 

“He is not,” he says. “Grindelwald was more of a showman. An open radical. He enjoyed controversy and spectacle. Thrived off of it, some would say. He had no interest in compromise, or persuasion, past a certain point. He was- he remains a brilliant mind, and he was incredibly dangerous as a sorceror, but Tom is a different breed. He prefers a more subtle approach… most of the time.” 

His mouth folds in on itself. “I am afraid of another war. A more localized, concentrated one.”

“Here,” Amy says. “You mean… fighting here, amongst ourselves.”

“Yes. Grindelwald’s armies never reached Britain. Tom’s most fervent supporters are already here, among us, and any direct attack or challenge to his power will make a martyr of him, in their eyes. I had hoped Miss Skeeter and Miss Greengrass could open up a… back door, for us, so to speak, by airing some of the worst of his misdeeds before the fact. To turn the tide of public opinion.”

“He just had dozens of children taken from their families,” Amy says. “And he’s got plenty of enemies here.”

“I assume you are going to tell me what you mean to use that Veritaserum for,” Dumbledore says, steepling his fingers through his beard.

“Skeeter and Greengrass found members of the Knights willing to talk,” Amy says. She swallows, hard. “I have another way to get them to talk.”

Dumbledore frowns. “I’d be interested to hear how you plan to continuously drug a Knight with Veritaserum.”

“I only need to pull it off once,” Amy says. “Just once. We know what he does to traitors, now. No mercy. And so do they, his followers. We can- I can use that.”

“Blackmail,” says Dumbledore.

“Yes,” she says fiercely. “And I know exactly who fits the bill, who cannot afford to have their loyalty questioned.”

She doesn’t have to wait long for him to catch on. 

“June Carmody,” he says. “You are proposing drugging your colleague into revealing sensitive information pertaining to the Knights of Walpurgis and Tom Riddle’s activities, and then using that to blackmail her into an informant.”

“Why not?” Amy feels her lip curl. “She’s used to that already, reporting on people.”

“June Carmody is no fool. Even if you succeed, she might react. Violently. Can you defend yourself against her?”

“I don’t have to,” Amy says. “She won’t hurt me. She can’t. She knows how he’d react.”

Dumbledore exhales, leans back in his seat, suddenly seeming older, as he occasionally does, his eyes no longer so bright and clear in his lined face. “You are relying very heavily on the assumption that he will always value you over power.”

“He doesn’t value me,” Amy scoffs. “He just can’t stand the thought of not having me around to torment. Like some kind of sick security blanket.”

Dumbledore says nothing, for a moment. “I would like to advise against this,” he says. “Even if you feel you are safe from physical harm, there are other ways you could be hurt in retaliation for this-”

“No risk, no reward. Isn’t that a Gryffindor motto?” she challenges.

“-And despite my caution,” he says, without missing a beat, “I don’t think you’re asking for my permission. Am I correct?”

“Yes,” says Amy, firmly. 

Fawkes squawks from atop his perch, then flaps down onto Dumbledore’s shoulder, digging his talons into his robes. 

“Well,” he says. “If you are determined, then I suggest you consult Sidney Finch. He’s been watching June for me for some time now, and is well acquainted with her habits. But then it’s fortunate that you and he are already quite close.”

He knows about us, she thinks, and tries not to let it show on her face. “I just need one chance to do it,” she says. “And then we’re off to the races.”

He smiles, dryly. “Ah, to be fresh in the flower of youth.”

“Not the folly?” she challenges. 

“Well,” Dumbledore says, “that, too. But I made a vow.” He taps his right forearm, meaningfully. “I will not allow any harm to come to your daughter.”

“I know,” she says. “And this is how I protect her. By getting under his skin. The way he’s gotten under mine and yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. For right now, Grass Crown will be updating every 2 weeks because it gives me more time to work out the chapters and adjust my outline accordingly. I'm setting a hard stop-point of this fic being 60 chapters, so hopefully we can stick to that deadline. That means we have, counting this chapter, 20 chapters left to cover 4-ish years. 
> 
> 2\. I wanted to give more background on Lydia this chapter; her childhood was obviously quite traumatic and her aunt Therese played a large role in that trauma, essentially raising Lydia as if she were her own child while subjecting her to intense rules and severe consequences for breaking them. 
> 
> 3\. Tom is still on the warpath after the near miss with the Princes, intent on making sure none of his followers have hard physical evidence that could be stolen or seized by aurors in a raid to be used against him. Lydia gets the sense that it was much more of a close call than he was willing to let on. 
> 
> 4\. Tom believes he can force Gregory Pike, the head auror and head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, to play nice because Gregory's beloved daughter Doreen is now engaged to one of Tom's cronies, Henry Rowle. 
> 
> 5\. The Nott family home is based off Ripley Castle, which is a real place and still used as a private home. Because my conception of the pureblood elite is as being pretty profoundly trapped in the past, Lydia notes that Therese has given Valerie clothes that would have been in style in the Edwardian period fifty years ago, and the house itself is still decorated in the Georgian manner... which was very much out of date in 1840, never mind 1960. 
> 
> 6\. Lydia is feeling the pressure to get pregnant and have a child, something that doesn't seem to be happening despite her and Tom having semi-regular sex. Her sister-in-law Cecily is pregnant again, and her cousin Walburga has just had a son, Sirius, surprise surprise. Despite this, she doesn't have any real desire or urge to be a mother, and is resentful that that's all anyone wants to discuss with her these days. Tom being self-absorbed and inattentive at best and manipulative and emotionally abusive at worst is not helping manners. 
> 
> 7\. Amy's been dreaming of the past with increasing frequency; for whatever reason, memories of her brief time with Frank Shelby keep resurfacing. In this chapter we learn he's been held captive for what seems like months by an infamous witch who was one of Grindelwald's biggest supporters, Marya Berezhna, who got a brief reference way back in Barbed Wire, when her exploits in Kiev were discussed by the Daily Prophet. She is most well known for being a very talented necromancer. 
> 
> 8\. One of my biggest problems in this fic has been 'what I do I actually have the Order of the Phoenix do beyond vague spying and reconnaissance?' Things are obviously to to the point of open fighting in the streets just yet, but canon was not very helpful. When I went back over the 5th book, for example, I realized.... we don't actually get much information on what the Order are doing, at all, until the fight at the Ministry. We also don't get much information in the 6th book, other than they're guarding Hogwarts because it's obvious Voldemort is preparing to attack it at some point. And then after that, there's finally open warfare in book 7. This is acceptable in canon because Harry isn't being told much since he's a child and Dumbledore has a vested interest in keeping him in the dark. It's less acceptable when our narrator is Amy, who is very much an adult. 
> 
> 9\. Anyways, the Veritaserum had to come back into play at some point, right? I couldn't just have Amy be very talented at brewing this one potion and then only bring it up once. And June is about as likely a target as any; Amy believes Tom considers the Carmody-Norbrook family far more expendable to his cause, since they aren't very wealthy and they aren't purebloods. And in case anyone forgot, Amy made Dumbledore swear an Unbreakable Vow to keep Mae safe to the best of his ability way back when they first seriously discussed Tom's rise to power, as a sort of insurance policy. 
> 
> 10\. As always you can find me on [dwellordream](https://dwellordream.tumblr.com/).


	41. Matthew VI - Mae XX

THE FOREST OF DEAN, SEPTEMBER 1960

Matthew was born and raised in Hertfordshire and while he was never a city boy, never spent much time roaming about the woods, either. He was something of a homebody as a child and more content to stay put aside from the occasional trip to the seashore or into London. The Forest of Dean, as it were, is about as foreign to him as another land entirely, and the company he’s keeping doesn’t help matters.

Throughout the summer Pike was content to let Matthew and Joan work other cases, and had two- well, ‘eccentric’ would be the polite term for them, werewolf hunters combing through the highlands and river valleys, but now they have their first real lead in months, and Matthew knows he should feel triumphant, even excited, rather than dismayed. 

Whether Virgil Mulciber murdered his uncle or not, and despite the fact that his trial heavily focused on that murder- the killing of a ‘respectable’ pureblood gentleman, and not a slew of muggle girls- he is serving life in Azkaban, and shouldn’t that be some consolation to Matthew? 

Joan seems pleased enough with it, and the rest of the department is relieved to no longer have to deal with the pressure of catching a killer. Their other major manhunt- for Jaime Isola- ended in April. Matthew has been trying to get an appointment to visit Isola in prison, but so far all his requests have been denied. He sees Gaunt’s hand all over that. 

Still, while it keeps him up at night to think that someone who saved his life is now confined to a small, dank cell, tormented by the constant presence of Dementors, he can hardly argue that Isola is an innocent man. He’s a smuggler, a thief, and a murderer, and he certainly did kill Cyril Taylor and likely many others- but he didn’t deserve to be tortured and hunted down like an animal, either. Matthew would have never thought something like that a few years ago, but it’s true. Or feels true, at least. 

But it’s hard not to feel like a failure as he trudges through the forest alongside Joan, Pike, and the hunters. He promised Dumbledore he would get in with Pike, bring him onto their side, convince him of the dangers Gaunt’s government poses to them all, but he’s had little success with that. He thought he’d have a decent shot after Mulciber’s trial, but Pike seemed to shut himself up even more, despite the praises heaped upon him for seeing swift justice done, and Norbrook has been a constant thorn in his side, always with Pike, always having his ear. 

Matthew is very aware he is not going to get a second chance at this. Gaunt wanted him out of the way enough once to sic Applewhite on him, and only hasn’t followed up with that because this time it might arouse genuine suspicion. But if he puts himself in the- ugh, what do muggles call it, the… the crosslashes- the crosshairs!- again, Matthew isn’t naïve enough to pretend to not know what will happen. 

He’s a capable duelist and he’d like to think he has decent intuition, especially after the events of the past two years, but if it comes down to him or Michael Applewhite, Applewhite will kill him. And if it comes down to him or Tom Gaunt, well- he has Evie and Beth to think about. He and Evelyn are on better terms than they were this time last year, but he knows she’s still mistrustful of his word, and worries constantly he just won’t come home someday, and that will be that. Last month they thought- well, they thought she might be pregnant again, and she’d burst into tears at the prospect. She wasn’t, but it stung. Badly. He’s always counted himself as dependable, responsible, and loyal- a good husband, a good father. 

But how much is he willing to sacrifice to get that one shot at taking down Tom Gaunt? It’s easy for men like Dumbledore, who have no family, no attachments, who’ve lived out their lives. Matthew still has much to lose. And sometimes he feels like it’s all been spilling through his cupped hands like sand ever since that rainy night in Spain. 

There was some business in the spring- coinciding with the raid on the Princes- some sort of near miss. Norbrook went around for two months looking like a vein in his forehead might burst. But ultimately, the storm passed, and Gaunt’s government emerged more or less unscathed. As did the Knights of Walpurgis, aside from a few slaps on the wrist and unfavorable opinion editorials in the Daily Prophet. 

Someone jerks him roughly to the side; Matthew starts, a hand on his wand holster. Joan is looking at him in concern. “You almost tripped down a gulch,” she says, shaking her head. “Did you sleep alright last night? You look very far away.”

“Sorry,” he says, relieved Pike hasn’t noticed him stumbling around like a drunkard, but their superior is engrossed in discussion with the hunters.

The hunters- it feels ridiculous even to call them that. But what other word is there for it? The mercenaries? The beast slayers? 

“Bonnie and Clyde,” Joan calls them, behind their backs. It’s a reference to some muggle… film? Comic strip? Real people? He can never keep these things straight. And it’s not really Bonnie and Clyde, it’s Bonnie and Clive. Bonnie Decker, an American witch, and Clive Westerville, an English wizard, to be exact. 

He’d never heard of either of them before they popped up in May; apparently they’ve spent the past five or so years roaming around Europe and the Americas, doing odd jobs and hunts for various magical governments at their wit’s ends with pesky ‘intelligent’ creatures, like werewolves, vampires, and the like, or for… private parties. Matthew doesn’t really want to consider what that means. 

Pike is of the opinion that they’re beneath the department’s moral fiber, but they’re also the only ones who got them this far in the first place. The area they’re searching is- well, was being cleared for a new coal mine- but it was abandoned a month and a half ago after workers reported sightings of ‘wild dogs’ and ‘strange tramps’ in the wood. 

No muggle would believe that there could be wolves sighted in England again, and few wizards or witches would, either. The Ministry has done their best to hush up the news of the five attacks since the new year. Three of the five were on muggles, which made it easier. The other two, one on a young wizard, the other on a teenaged witch, both resulted in deaths; they didn’t survive their wounds by the time it took to get them to St. Mungo’s. 

Twigs crackle underfoot, and then, in the shadow of an elm, Westerville raises a clenched fist, signaling a top. The forest around them is still in the deep green of summer, and it’s not a bad day; no rain so far, and a pleasant summer breeze swirling around the leaves. Still, the back of Matthew’s neck is prickling and tingling, and he can’t shake an uneasy feeling in his gut that he’s learned to listen to. 

The problem is that he’s not certain if the feeling is due to the possibility of werewolves close at hand, or the hunters themselves. 

Bonnie Decker is a tall, leggy blonde witch who dresses like she knows quite well that she could turn heads in any room on either side of the Atlantic. Matthew puts her at about thirty five years old, maybe a little younger, though her New York accent still catches him off guard. 

The papers claim American wizards are more ‘in tune’ with muggle fads and technology and much more modern and progressive than their British counterparts, but Matthew has no idea how true any of that is, only that their magical secrecy laws are ridiculously lax, their law enforcement is a jumbled mess that varies from state to state, and their government has been flying by the seat of their pants since the colonial days. At least, that’s the popular perception. 

Bonnie wears her hair in an angular pixie cut that frames her long face well, though her sleek bangs are partially obscured by her sports cap. Neither she nor her partner wear robes; nothing long or flowing, no bright colors, little jewelry, though pins rattle every so often on the back of Westerville’s battered leather jacket. 

Matthew thinks him a bit younger, Clive, maybe thirty at the most, with a shaved head and a vaguely obstinate, defiant attitude that seems more suited to a teenage boy than a grown man. Still, the scars on his thick, muscled arms and ropy neck indicate someone who can take care of himself- and ‘take care of’ anyone who might cross him. He must be a halfblood or muggleborn; Westerville’s not a magical last name. 

As for Decker; who has any clue? The Americans pride themselves on eschewing everything the old families stood for, and traditional notions of blood purity are part of that, though they’re arguably even more contemptuous of muggles than most British wizards. 

“Right,” Decker says, turning back to them, and speaking in hushed tones while Westerville scans the tree line suspiciously. “We’re coming up on the mines now. We’re only a few days from a full moon, so you’d all better be on guard. Lots of people make the mistake of assuming werewolves are harmless unless it’s a full moon, and night.”

“But they can only transform once the moon has risen,” Joan says, frowning, though she keeps her voice low. Pike says nothing, his arms folded against his broad chest.

“Can only fully transform,” Westerville mutters, and points roughly to a gruesome scar along the side of his neck. “Wolf clawed me in Mexico, three years ago. Was two weeks from the full moon, broad daylight. They can force a partial transformation, you get them wild enough. Claws. Teeth. They won’t turn you, but they’ll fuck you up. They’re strong, even the women.”

Pike frowns. “Most werewolves are male.”

“They’d like you to think that,” Decker scoffs. “We once tracked a whole pack of she-wolves through the Ozarks. They’ll turn whatever they can sink their teeth into. Men, women, kids… the kids mostly don’t survive it, though, and God knows it’s hard for them to reproduce, you know, naturally. Thank Tituba. Then we’d have real problems. But they’re worse than vampires; they can walk around in broad daylight, and they love to steal wands, the ones who used to be witches, at least.”

“So what’s the plan?” Matthew mutters, ignoring the fact that none of this is making him feel any better. “You think they’re still hanging around?”

Westerville grins. It’s not a pretty smile. “Well, we’ll just have to find out.”

“Circle up,” Decker orders. “The last thing we should be doing is fanning out. That just lets them pick you off easy. We watch each other’s backs, no one breaks formation. You hear or see anything, tell us. We’ll light this place up.” Her wand sparks with an acrid smell; Joan grimaces.

Pike shakes his head. “I doubt they’re still hanging around. They’ll have realized the muggles know something’s amiss, and they’ll be expecting us to come pay a call sooner or later.”

Decker shrugs. “You might be right. They may have tore off somewhere else. They might have dug out a den to hide. Or they might be watching, and waiting, to see what we do.”

But as they steadily advance through the trees and onto the hillside that makes up what is meant to be mines, now pockmarked with caves and various half-dug tunnels and pathways, the only sound is the wind rustling in the trees, and the distant cry of birds. Decker keeps her gaze level, constantly sweeping their surroundings, while Westerville looks down at the ground for tracks, but it’s impossible to find anything clear; the grass is packed down dirt from boots stomping all over it. 

“We should check the caves,” Pike says, when it becomes evident they’re not about to be ambushed right off the bat. 

Decker and Westerville exchange a look, and agree, on the condition that everyone keeps their wands lit up, and they check them one by one. 

Matthew spots it first; “Fur,” he says, not bothering to keep his voice down anymore; if the wolves are close, they will have smelt them by now, if not heard them. “There.”

There’s a scrap of it on the ground; closer inspection reveals what seems like it could be tracks, along the hillside. Joan pockets the fur, not that it will do them much good unless a tracing charm works, and the five of them puzzle over the mess of tracks left in the mud. 

“We’ve got at least five distinct imprints,” Westerville says after a few tense moments.

“Six,” Decker corrects him. “No, seven.”

“Seven werewolves?” Joan says hoarsely. “We’d thought no more than three or four, at most-,”

Pike looks even grimmer than usual, if that’s possible. “The last known pack in Britain was running around in the 1890s,” he says. “That was a dozen at their peak, and the Ministry was far less equipped to track them at that point. We’re going to have to bring in the Werewolf Capture Unit, if this isn’t a lone…” he grunts, then concedes, “well, a lone wolf.”

Westerville snorts under his breath, and Decker looks amused. “What’s their success rate, your little… capture unit?” she asks, mildly. 

“They haven’t had much work, in the last few decades,” Pike admits. 

“They don’t know what they’re in for,” Westerville says. “You’re better off leaving it to the professionals. The largest pack Bonnie and I ever traced were thirty strong. Remember Siberia, darling?” He shoots a crooked grin at Bonnie, who examines her nails casually. 

“We took down ten of them, their strongest fighters,” she says. “The authorities managed to captured another six, over the next year and a half. The rest made themselves scarce. But they moved on to more remote territory, left the villages they’d been stalking alone. It’s in their nature, you know. To want to create more of their own. Their only safety is in numbers.”

How is that any different from us, Matthew thinks dryly, and wonders if Decker and Westerville would be half so cocky if they were out here alone. 

The caves and some of the tunnels offer up various finds. Animal remains, mostly; bones, gristle, fur and feathers. Werewolves will eat just about anything, compelled to hunt during the full moon, and as humans are arguably the top of the food chain, most of the time they must settle for far more common and weak prey. 

But there’s evidence of other food, too, less natural food; Joan finds some filthy cans and bottles, a few tattered cardboard containers, scattered trash. They haven’t just been hunting, as wolves or humans. They’ve been scavenging for food as well. 

Pike turns up broken dishware, and oddly enough, a bent metal fork. The idea of a werewolf using a fork is somehow oddly funny to Matthew, though that might just be nerves that’s making him want to chuckle. 

The uneasy sensation hasn’t faded. He’s not sure if they’re being watched or not, though Westerville and Decker keep standing watch, leery of being ambushed from behind as they search the caves and shafts. 

“This something new,” Decker says at one point, and holds it up for them to see on the end of a stick. It’s a tattered child’s rag doll, covered in mud and grass, the head almost torn off. 

Joan sucks in a breath. “You think they’re… taking trophies?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Westerville says. “They’re mongrels to the bone. Animal enough to lose themselves to the chase, human enough to enjoy the kill. You’d be surprised how many of them fantasize about these kinds of things.”

Matthew thinks of Susan Jameson, whose body was never found alongside her boyfriend’s, and the red coat left behind. 

No other personal items are discovered, though, aside from a man’s shoe and some broken beads from a necklace of some kind. 

“No fires,” Pike observes. “They didn’t want to risk discovered through the smoke.”

“No scat,” Decker says, prompting Joan and Matthew to toss disgusted looks at her. She shrugs, unfazed. “Sometimes they mark their territory.”

But it is the largest cave, this one a natural one, not the result of the would-be miners digging through the rock and soil, that turns up the most unnerving find. 

“Probably slept in here, all piled up together,” Decker says, waving the yellow light of her wand around the earthen space. There’s some evidence of that; moldering rags and what looks like the ratty remains of a quilt on the muddy floor, and piles of leaves and brush, maybe stacked around to ward off wind and rain from being swept in. 

What kind of life is this, Matthew thinks, almost pityingly, as he gazes around the crude space. Always on the run, barely surviving, sleeping out in the open every night… It is not illegal to be a werewolf in Great Britain. But all werewolves must be registered, and they are largely forbidden from owning wands, attending Hogwarts, or working most jobs, unless granted special permissions by the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Beasts. 

He’d never thought much of it before; werewolves were relegated to radio shows and cheap comic books, fantastical stories in the gossip rags. Something to be feared and scorned and pitied. He’d simply assumed, at some point, that the last werewolves had died out long ago, and now were simply legends. 

Now, though… this is unsettlingly real, and right under his nose. 

“Oh, my-,” Joan cuts off a sharp gasp, as the light of her wand sweeps over something on the floor. “Pike, stop!” she snaps, and Pike stops walking immediately, frozen, wand outstretched.

“Fuck, is it a snare?” Westerville demands, not moving, either.

“No,” Matthew looks down himself, and sees it clearly now; what he’d assumed at first glance were simply scattered stones and pebbles… are really, much, much more. “It’s a symbol.”

Pike cautiously retreats two steps, and Decker says, “Lumos maxima,” in a hushed tone, casting a burst of light across the ground. 

“A skull,” Matthew says, as the outline becomes clearer. “It’s… it’s a skull, isn’t it?” It certainly looks like one; he can make out the sockets of an eye and nose, a gaping, open jaw, with something protruding from it. A bone?

No, a snake. A twisting line of stones outlines the coils of a serpent, escaping from the literal jaws of death clenched around its lithe form. 

They are all silent, though Matthew can hear Joan’s tense breathing as she takes it in. 

“Why would they put that here?” he finally asks. “Is it… it must mean something to them, this… sign. But why a snake?”

“Some packs brand themselves,” Decker ventures. “I’ve… I’ve seen that a few times, where they’ll… mark their skin, scar themselves, deliberately, so they can identified to one another, but… never anything like this. It’s usually more… nondescript.”

“This is not nondescript,” Joan says shakily. “Not in the least.”

Matthew can’t quite pinpoint what is so frightening about it. The skull itself should be almost comical, bringing to mind pirate flags or something juvenile like that. But… the snake coming out of it… He doesn’t know. He can’t put his finger on it. 

Then he looks at Pike, and sees, for an instant, a flicker of shock. Of recognition. Before it’s smoothed away. 

“A snake doesn’t make sense,” Westerville agrees, distracting Matthew. “What the hell’s that got to do with lycanthropy? If it were a wolf’s head, that would be one thing…”

There’s a scuffle of sound from outside, and they all immediately brace, turning for the entrance behind them, but there’s no one there. Cautiously, they emerge back into the open air. The area is still deserted, seemingly. 

“Homenum revelio,” Matthew casts, and watches the light of the spell seep into the earth around them, but it doesn’t react to any lurking presence. 

“They wanted people to find that,” Joan says. “It must be a message. It has to be. They knew we would come here, they wanted that left behind.”

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, it is to have a thankless child,” Pike shoves his hands into his overcoat pockets, sounding back to his usual stoic self.

“Shakespeare fan?” Decker smirks at him.

“King Lear,” Joan replies, looking at him with a frown. “He says that about one of his daughters, when she abandons him, the old king.”

But Matthew is thinking of something else, older than that. “They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips,” he recounts. “Psalm... I don’t know what number. It’s about… delivery from evil. Protection against it. About how the evil seek to overthrow the good and righteous.”

Westerville snorts like this is some joke he doesn’t quite get, while Pike simply says, “We need a photographer in here. I want pictures of every inch of this land.” He shoots a hard glance at the hunters. “Can you track them from here?”

“We can try,” Decker says, with a sharp smile, while Westerville promises to bring some dogs in. 

As they leave the colliery, the hunters trudge off, conversing in hushed tones, and Pike sends Joan hurrying back to the road with a message for the department. For a few minutes, it is just Matthew and he, walking along through the dewy late summer grass. 

“You’ve seen that before,” Matthew says, deciding to risk it. Decker and Westerville aren’t close enough to overhear them, and the wind rushing through the trees will cover their murmurs anyways. “That sign… sir.”

Pike says nothing, then says, “I have. So has Arthur Norbrook. And many, many other people you and I work alongside every day.” His tone has shifted from his usual flat affect to a more gravelly warning. “So I want you to understand something, Abbott. You’re not nearly as subtle as you think, but I’ll give you this much. I keep Norbrook close because sometimes, it’s better to have a viper in your hand than striking at your ankles. Do you understand me?”

Matthew doesn’t look at his face, keep his gaze trained on the forest floor, but murmurs, “It has something to do with the Knights, then, that sign?” He’s not sure if he should feel relieved or worried that Pike has finally revealed he’s more aware than he’s been letting on. 

“It has everything to do with them,” Gregory Pike says firmly, and then will say no more, as they break out of the treeline and back into the bright afternoon sunshine. 

HOGWARTS, SEPTEMBER 1960

On the third day of classes of her fourth year, Mae wakes feeling like she’s drowning, shaking off the vestiges of a nightmare she can’t put a name to. Her chest hurts for a moment, before the pang of anxiety fades and she realizes Christine is impatiently waiting for her as she laces up her shoes. 

“Everyone else went down for breakfast,” she informs Mae, in her typical, waspish, Christine fashion. “But I said I’d wait for you to get a move on. Marian tried to wake you up, but you just rolled over muttering to yourself.” She pauses, as Mae kicks back the covers, groaning, then adds, with a slight smirk, “And Valerie wanted to dump a cup of water on your head.”

“Valerie’s been a bitch since term started,” Mae grumbles as she forces her unwilling body up and out of bed. The past two days she didn’t have class until ten o’clock in the morning, but today they’ve got Defence at nine o’clock sharp. 

“You know why,” Christine says, lowering her voice, even though there’s no one left in the dorm. 

Mae does know why, in detail; she got through three brief letters to Valerie this past summer, not that either of them can admit that. Well, Valerie almost brought it up, but Mae got her to drop it. She doesn’t need people putting two and two together and figuring out that, oh, well, as it would happen, Valerie’s freaky foster parents are in fact great friends with Mae’s, hrm, biological father? And that oh, by and by, he’s sort of the one responsible for everything terrible that’s happened in the first place. 

For now she just tries to forget it, though she feels a little ashamed of insulting Valerie, who had a miserable summer, cut off from her family with no warning, not even a goodbye. Mae doesn’t know how she’d react if she’d been taken away from Mum like that. She’d run away, probably, but to where? It’s not as if Valerie’s been kidnapped and can just go to the aurors or the police and tell them to take her home. And she can’t exactly live on the run, can she; she’s fourteen.

Not that that’s stopped Eileen Prince, if the rumors are true, though Eileen was eighteen and graduated when she went missing. Maggie Adler swears that Eileen isn’t missing at all, but that she burned up in that fire with her parents and that reporter, but everyone knows that’s not true. 

Janet Belgrave swears that Eileen ran away to escape some arranged marriage to some pureblood heir, but why would she need to escape it if her parents were dead? Colin Elsegood says that’s all a load of nonsense, anyways, and that Eileen actually has some dirt on her parents’ killer, even though they say the fire was accidental. 

But Ambrose, who Mae trusts the most of the Slytherins, well, he says that Eileen hasn’t really run away at all, she’s just given up being a witch- that she had some kind of nervous breakdown and couldn’t take it anymore, and that she’s really just hiding in plain sight, living a muggle life, her wand locked away. 

Everyone knows Eileen got top marks on all her NEWTs last spring, that she was only second to Minerva McGonagall, who now has some cushy Ministry job straight out of school, and Mae can’t see why she would throw that all away, but maybe she felt like she had nothing left to lose, with her family dead. Mae wouldn’t just give up, though, if she was in Eileen’s shoes. She’d want revenge. 

And if someone really did kill her parents, like… like the Knights of Walpurgis or someone like them, then Mae would spend the rest of her life hunting them down, and she would kill them so slowly and carefully they’d be begging for death. 

That’s what Mae likes to think, anyways. 

She dresses in a hurry and follows Christine all the way out of the Ravenclaw Tower and downstairs, dodging Peeves, who is pelting students with chewed up balls of gum, but they don’t have enough time to sit down for breakfast properly, so they have to snag toast and fruit instead and join the throng of fourth years headed to Carmody’s classroom. 

“I thought you were going to cut class,” Malcolm remarks snidely, as he sees Mae manically chewing toast, because Carmody doesn’t allow food in the classroom. 

“Right, and wind up in detention my first week?” she scoffs, after swallowing, and wishing she had some milk or juice to wash it down. 

Marian wordlessly offers Mae her thermos of tea. Mae takes a slurp and hands it back, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. “Thanks.”

Marian just shakes her head, looking vaguely disgusted. 

“Oi, Benson,” someone says, and Mae looks around, but is only met with boyish snickers. She rolls her eyes, and ignores them. 

“I hope we’re learning something decent, not just stupid summer review,” she says to Valerie, as they file into the classroom. 

Valerie shrugs, scowling, and pushes her long ponytail over her shoulder. Usually her hair would be shorter than this, closer to her shoulders, but the Notts didn’t let her get it cut over the summer. 

She says Mrs. Nott said it would be unwomanly, or something like that. Mae doesn’t get what their problem is, since Valerie is fourteen, and definitely not a woman. Mum says even seventeen is barely a woman, which is kind of ridiculous, since Mum had Mae when she was only eighteen, but-

“Seats,” Professor Carmody is more tense than she usually is on the first day of classes, standing up tall in front of the blackboard in her usual dramatic high heels, her cat sitting on her desk. “Seats,” she raises her voice to be heard over the clamor of students. “Now. No dallying about, I want to get started- no, you may not move the desks around! Sit!”

Mae takes a seat by the window in the second row, behind Christine, whose blonde head she is used to staring at by now, and next to Valerie, with Marian diagonal to the front of her. The rest of the class follows suit, dumping bookbags on the ground and slouching around their desks, desks that seem smaller every year, to Mae’s dismay. When she was a first year her feet did not even quite touch the ground when she sat up straight. Now she feels tall and awkward, not a child but not an adult. 

Carmody looks the same, though. Mae has seen a bit more of her son, recently; he’s one now, and she saw him toddling about in their front garden a few times over the summer. He has reddish hair like his mother, and a big head. She still doesn’t quite see the appeal of babies and toddlers. Mum got her a baby doll once she was little, but Mae mostly used it to act out stories or did terrible things to it so her stuffed animals could come to the rescue.

She feels a sudden surge of longing for her old bedroom back on Gibraltar, small and cramped as it was, for her night light and her old childhood toys shut up in cardboard boxes, for the shadows the sun would make on the wall and sloped ceiling. 

“We are going to begin this term,” Carmody says, “with a brief section on the Unforgivable Curses.” 

A curious hush falls over the class.

“This is not the first and last time we will be discussing them in this class, and if you proceed onto the NEWT level course we will be having a much more detailed lesson on them, but now that you are all fourth years, I trust you are mature enough to handle this topic with the respect it deserves,” Carmody says sharply, casting a critical gaze over the sea of upturned faces. “Anyone who wants to interrupt, crack jokes, or even pretend to curse a classmate will be sent straight to Headmaster Dippet’s office, am I clear?” 

She waits until there is a reluctant chorus of “Yes, Professor.” in response, then nods decisively.

“Very well. We’ll begin, today, by discussing the Cruciatus Curse.” She writes out the name on the board. “Can anyone tell me what the exact effects of the curse on the human body are?”

Mae’s classmates seem much more reluctant to answer than usual, even Christine, but then John Amory raises his hand. 

“Yes?”

“Pain,” he says, then clears his throat. “It causes intense pain on the target of the spell, but it… it doesn’t leave any marks on you”

“Very good,” says Carmody. “The Cruciatus Curse is excruciating because it is an unseen, hidden pain, only felt by the sufferer. Most every magical culture has some version of this curse. The version we are most familiar with is cast with the spell phrase, Crucio.” She holds her wand as she says that, but doesn’t wave it about. 

“Unlike many ‘common’ hexes and curses, the Cruciatus Curse is considered to be fairly advanced, and it is difficult to correctly cast. It requires a great deal of concentration, and a strong intent to harm another person. Some of the consequences of the curse on the inflicted are that it can leave behind severe mental and emotional repercussions. Unlike a physical wound, the body sometimes has difficulty accepting that it can heal.”

Mae wonders at that. What does she mean, like a mental wound? Like shellshock? Mum’s told her about that before, and she’s read about it too. Even people who weren’t soldiers in the war have got it, just from being bombed or seeing people die in front of them. 

She wonders what the pain from a Cruciatus Curse feels like. Is it like being stabbed, over and over again, a piercing pain? Or a burning one? Does it feel like you’re suffocating for air, and can’t breathe? Does it feel like drowning?

Carmody says she’s not allowed to demonstrate the curse, not even on a fly or a cockroach, because of the new curriculum rules, so she has them study its history instead. Mae can feel her eyes glazing over as she pores over page after page about every infamous instance of its use over the past six hundred years, the names and faces reduced to printed letters on a page and dry, technical descriptions- she plummeted out of a window to end her torment, he writhed in agony, clawing at his skin- until there’s a muffled gasp and a few snickers. 

She glances over to see that Valerie’s nose is dripping blood all over her textbook; she has a full-on nosebleed, and is bright red with mortification as the class giggles and mutters to each other. 

“Alright,” Carmody says shortly, glaring at Melvyn Taggart until he stops laughing. “Up you get, Miss Faraday- Miss Benson, why don’t you accompany her to the nearest lavatory, so she can wash her face?”

Mae isn’t squeamish of blood- how could she be, after spending so much collecting food for various snakes? And she’s not about turn down an opportunity to get out of this stuffy classroom, since they’re not doing anything but reading history. And Valerie is her friend, one of her best friends. She holds the door open for her, and they slip out into the cool corridor.

“I didn’t know you got nosebleeds,” she says, as they walk quickly down the hall towards the lavatory. She can’t remember Valerie ever having one before. 

“I don’t,” Valerie lisps through her bloody hand clenching shut her nostrils. "Usually. I was picking at it.”

Mae wrinkles her own nose. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just started doing it over the summer. I would-,” Valerie coughs as Mae holds open the washroom door for her, “I would get in trouble if I chewed my nails or my lip, so I started picking at my nose.”

Mae thinks there’s probably some kind of medical term for this, but she doesn’t know what it is. In the bright light of the bathroom, the sunshine from the windows magnified off of the stark white tiling, she makes out the spatter of blood down Valerie’s chin and neck and on the collar of her blouse. Luckily her tie and cardigan are too dark to tell. 

Mae hands her a handful of paper towels as Valerie hunches over one of the sinks, spluttering, while a toilet flushes in one of the stalls. 

Mae turns around, adopting a casual, languid expression to make Valerie feel less flustered, then blanches as Agneza Gavran comes out of the stall, a boy with her. 

“Morning, Benson,” she says, shooting Mae a guilty smug smile, or at least it seems that way to Mae. 

Mae stares daggers at the boy, a Gryffindor who she doesn’t recognize; he must be a sixth year, like Agneza. He doesn’t seem too concerned about the fact that he’s in the girl’s lavatory, or that it is incredibly obvious what they were doing in there; both of their shirts are rumpled and his tie is practically all the way loosened. 

Agneza’s choppy platinum blonde hair is a mess; she waves goodbye to the boy, who Mae thinks is on the Gryffindor quidditch team; one of the reserves, maybe? He walks out after checking to make sure the coast is clear, his hands in his trouser pockets, whistling without a care in the world, pleased as punch.

Agneza seems unfazed by Valerie’s bloody nose, and busies herself with combing her fingers through her hair and smoothing out the wrinkles in her blouse. Mae tries not to think about what she might have been doing with that boy, to ease the vicious butterflies pelting around in her belly, and the rush of blood in her ears. 

“Get into a fight, Faraday?” Agneza finally asks Valerie, when she’s done adjusting herself; she really is incredibly beautiful, like one of those actresses they photograph pretending to be casual and homely in their Paris apartments, in their slippers and robe, their hair askew. Her tone implies that she’s not serious. 

“No,” Valerie mutters, still dabbing at her nose. 

“Who was that?” Mae asks, trying not to sound bothered in the least. She and Agneza are sort of friends, in a sixteen and fourteen year old way, and she doesn’t want to come across like some kind of shrill little prude, like Christine. 

“Oh, that was just Fred Avery,” Agneza says. 

Mae just knows the Averys as one of the old pureblood clans, and hates him instantly.

“We got together on the train back,” Agneza’s pink cheeks and slightly giddy tone betray her attempt to sound nonchalant, “And he’s taking me to the-,” she pauses, then arches a pale eyebrow. “Oh, I forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Valerie demands irritably, voice still muffled by all the paper towels. 

“Well, there’s going to be an event,” Agneza says, picking her bag back up, and slinging it over her shoulder. “They haven’t announced it yet, though. Mae ought to know, her mother’s a professor-,”

Mae has heard nothing of the sort, and is suddenly furious for it, and unwilling to admit it. She presses her lips together into a thin, haughty line, and raises her chin, trying to look impassive and disinterested. “And how would you know?” it comes out meaner than she meant it. 

“Oh, people like to tell me things,” Agneza says, with a grin. “But- well, we’ll have to see if they let in fourth years, or if it’s just for the eldest students. Anyways, I’ve got to go, I have Transfiguration in thirty minutes.” She practically floats out of the lavatory.

“She’s awfully full of herself,” Valerie says. “What happened to last year, when she’d punch a boy if he so much as looked twice at her?”

“I don’t know,” Mae realizes she’s gripping the porcelain sink a little too intensely. “I wish she wouldn’t.”

Valerie shoots her a sidelong glance. “Wouldn’t what?”

“What was she talking about, anyways?” Mae changes the subject quickly.

Valerie shrugs, then exhales and says, “No- oh, I think I do know what she was going on about. They were talking about it before they dropped me off at the station.” Valerie refuses to refer to the Notts by name. 

She switches on the faucet and scrubs furiously at her bloody hands, while Mae breathes in the rusty smell, trying to calm herself. She wants to- she doesn’t know what she wants to do. Why did Agneza have to be in here right now? Mae wants to run after her and- and she doesn’t know what. Hex her? And then-

“I think they’re throwing some kind of ball, or dance,” Valerie says, as she continues to scrub. “You know. As a special ‘treat’ for the school. For letting them come in and do whatever the hell they want.”

Mae closes her eyes, aggravated. “I don’t care,” she says. “I’m not going.” She thinks of that MESP gala Mum went to, what seems like ten years ago.

Valerie turns off the water, and dries her hands. “Yeah. Well. That makes two of us.”

The proof is in the pudding by the end of the week- or in the flyers pasted up all over the common room, cheerfully proclaiming that through the generous donations of the Board of Governors, the Department of Magical Education will be hosting a solstice ball for the students this December, in a ‘celebration of the light of learning kindled in our youth’. 

Mae sits and reads a second-hand Shakespeare collection and glowers at the glossy flyers until Christine drags her away for the first meeting of Dueling Club, that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I already have 2000 words of Chapter 42 written so I'm trying my best here to pre-write a lot of Grass Crown this month so we can possibly get back to weekly updates, because I don't want to crawl to the finish line.
> 
> 2\. I promised there would be werewolves in this story, and here we meet two werewolf hunters, Decker and Westerville. I am pretty much tossing out everything the uh 'expanded canon' says about the magical world in America and how werewolves themselves work, so if that bothers anyone, my apologies. 
> 
> 3\. There are actual small privately operated mines (collieries) in the Forest of Dean still in operation. Aside from that, I know nothing about mining. 
> 
> 4\. It's kind of embarrassing that the Dark Mark doesn't actually come up until Chapter 41 of this fic, but I didn't want to introduce it too early on, and this felt as good a place as any, since the Knights of Walpurgis are still largely operating underground and behind the scenes. 
> 
> 5\. On the upside, Pike has finally let Matthew know that he's not as ignorant of the sketchiness of Tom and his cronies as he pretends to be, and that he tolerates Norbrook blatantly spying on him in order to keep better track of Norbrook himself. 
> 
> 6\. While not as traumatic as Barty Crouch Jr/ 'Moody' actually demonstrating Unforgivable Curses to the fourth years, Carmody is plunging into some darker material here. 
> 
> 7\. I know the 'sudden nosebleed' is always used to signify deadly illness in fiction, but I swear, Valerie is not actually sick with anything, she's just been picking at her nose out of anxiety, since she spent her summer being micro-managed and emotionally kicked around by the Notts. 
> 
> 8\. Mae is plunging head-long into teen angst of varying sorts, but at least she has a school dance to look forward to! I'm sure nothing will go amiss there!


	42. Amy XIX - Mae XXI

HOGWARTS, OCTOBER 1960

“Shit,” Amy gasps, when she notes the time. “We’re late for the match- get up, To-Sid, get up,” she stumbles over her tongue and bites it, glad Sidney is still half-asleep, his face muffled by his pillow. The morning light casts wavering shadows over his slim back; he has a few freckles along his shoulder blades. 

He is one of those lucky men who looks much younger in sleep, any lines of age faded away. She feels like every time she glances in the mirror, a worn, strange woman scowls back at her, always harried, always in a hurry, checking over her shoulder to make sure the coast is clear. 

Her face heats up, and she turns away so Sidney will not see her red and flustered if he opens his eyes. She almost- she doesn’t know why she did that. She’s never done that before, never stumbled over names like that. She has never thought of Tom while intimate with someone else, never, she assures herself. He can’t have that. He’s not so far wormed under her skin, he doesn’t get to pollute everything else as well.

It’s because she is tired, she tells herself, still drowsy from the sleep you fall into after a night of intermittent sex and drinking. She’s tired, and hungover; she can feel a headache lurking in the back of her temple, though a quick potion cure and a cup of chamomile tea should help fix that up. 

She doesn’t even know why they were drinking, beyond midterm stress and the usual staff room gossip- the Notts are throwing the school a dance, Dumbledore is disappearing every weekend to consult with Irene Greengrass as she struggles to resurrect her case, Carmody shares pictures of her son and everyone smiles politely. 

She was tired, and- and something about waking up besides a man has always- well, they say you never forget your first, and Tom wasn’t just her first in that sense, but he was the first person she ever fell asleep innocently besides, and the first face she ever woke up to see in the morning, from the time when she was a child and would occasionally steal into his bedroom at Wool’s complaining of cold feet and drafty air. 

He usually woke first. 

Those days in Diagon, when they were staying at The Leaky Cauldron waiting for their sixth year to begin- she remembers waking up and hearing rain pattering on the windows. She knew he was awake because of how he was laying beside her, not as sprawled out as he would have been asleep, but taut and contained, but she could not understand why he was still in bed beside her, why he had not either gotten up or shook her awake, impatient to begin the day. 

“Were you watching me sleep?” she can hear her younger self say, groggily. 

“No,” he’d said, too quickly, with a small scowl. “I was resting my eyes.”

“Holding onto me?” And then she’d pulled him closer, slinging her leg over his, nuzzling into his bare chest. He smelled like soap, scrubbed all fresh and clean. She was teasing a bit and though he’d push her away, more annoyed than charmed, but instead he’d ran a hand through her tangled hair and then pulled on it until she looked up at him, and kissed her on the nose. 

Now Amy wrinkles her nose at the thought, as she tries to find her shoes. No, that can’t be right. She’s misremembering it. Tom wouldn’t have kissed her on the nose, that would be too- too juvenile, or silly for him, he was never- he would never have showed affection like that. 

She’s not remembering it right, is all. He couldn’t have kissed her on the nose. He probably told her to get up, or he slid a hand between her legs to see if she wanted to have one more go before housekeeping knocked on the door and discovered she’d snuck into his room. Tom was not the sort of boy who kissed girls on the nose and held them close on a rainy morning. 

“S’what the match is starting?” Sidney mutters, and Amy feels a stab of guilt. 

How can she even think about Tom right now? 

Sid is nothing like him, and that’s what matters. He would never try to control her, or coerce her, and he doesn’t want or expect anything from her but friendship. He’s never gotten upset or resentful of the fact that she will not- cannot- have a public relationship with him, that she won’t be called his girlfriend or… or whatever people their age call their partners. He doesn’t fuss over it, says he just likes being with her. 

“The quidditch match,” she says, a little calmer, as he pushes himself up on his elbows, rubbing a hand over his sleep-encrusted face. His hair is sticking up all over the place; it’s very endearing. 

Tom hated to look vulnerable or mussed in the mornings. He was so particular, he’d be in the bathroom much longer than her, fixing his hair or fussing with his tie and the tuck of his shirt.

“...Right,” Sidney nods, then sits up. “Alright. D’you want to get breakfast quick, first?”

“No,” says Amy. “People will want to know if we’re going down to the pitch or not. Best to just let them head out without us.” 

She stands up, smoothing down her rumpled cotton slip, which is bunched up around her hips until she shakes it loose. She finds her stockings discarded on the armchair where she left them. One has a run in it. 

Tom once put a run in a stocking of hers, hoisting her legs up around his waist as she frantically kissed him, and then stopped and had a pout over it, irritated with himself. She called him an old woman, so he bit her lip open, and then apologized with no real regret as she scratched at his back and bucked against him. 

Amy puts her stockings back on, though she has no idea where her underwear is. 

Sidney finds it on the end of the bed, where he left it. 

“Hey,” he tugs on her wrist as she pulls it back up her legs, then pulls her into his lap. He bounces her lightly on his legs, and Amy chuckles a little in spite of herself. “I don’t mean to stress you anymore than you are,” Sidney says, “but you did remember your potion, didn’t you?”

She kisses him on the cheek, unoffended by the question. “I took it last night.”

Birth control is also something she’s never allowed for any error in brewing, not since she had Mae. Even if she- if she had met someone, like Sidney, years ago, when Mae was young, she’s not certain she could have, or would have, been able to relinquish that control over herself, and had children with them. One pregnancy was enough, and childbirth- they say you forget the pain as soon as the baby’s in your arms, but not her. She never did. Never allowed herself to. 

Besides, she doesn’t think Sidney wants children, either. Not that he dislikes them; he’s a teacher, after all, but that he doesn’t have the time or inclination to retire from his career and bring up children of his own. Most of the professors here with children saw them out of the house long ago. 

She has no idea how Carmody manages, how she can stand it, having to rush home every day as soon as her classes are finished to tend to a baby. Amy doesn’t loathe babies, but she enjoyed Mae much more once she could walk and talk in full sentence, even if that also meant dealing with Mae’s fierce will and fiery tempers. 

“You don’t have to come with me,” she says, suddenly doubtful, and regretful. 

She counts it as sheer luck and very careful planning on their part that Carmody hasn’t picked up on any relations between her and Sidney and passed that along to Tom. She doesn’t have to wrack her brains to guess at what his reaction might be. Matthew was an innocent childhood romance. Sidney and her are both adults with sex drives. 

And Jaime- she can’t think too much on him. At least he’s alive. When she can- once this is through, she will figure out some way to get him out of Azkaban, she will, even if she has to hire Irene Greengrass and bankrupt herself to do so.

But Sidney just scoffs, standing up with her. “You need someone to watch your back. And besides, I’ve already made my excuses, and Iris will let us know straight away if she leaves the match for some reason.”

Iris Penvenen cannot produce a fully corporeal patronus; Amy certainly can’t, and neither can Sidney, but even a wisp of aura is enough to convey a hasty message along to another witch or wizard. 

Amy sometimes wonders what her own patronus might be, though she gave up trying to coax it out long ago. Something big, she thinks, from the wraith like form she’s seen, of silvery blue light. Something big and strong. That’s oddly comforting. 

She wonders what Mae’s might be. What Tom’s is. She hears a hissing in her ears, but forces a smile back at Sidney. “Alright. To war we go.”

He whistles a jaunty little marching tune that makes her snicker, and then they finish getting dressed. 

A light rain is pelting at the windows, and from this vantage point in Sidney’s rooms in the Astronomy Tower, Amy can watch the crowds of students and teachers making their way down for the first match of the season, Slytherin versus Gryffindor, sure to draw most of the school, since those games are always dramatic. 

Still, she doesn’t think the absence of a few professors will draw much attention; unlike June, neither she nor Sidney are the Head of House for Slytherin. Besides, they couldn’t just pick any Saturday morning, when Carmody might decide to come back up to the castle to get some paperwork done. This guarantees she’ll be gone for at least an hour, though Slytherin and Gryffindor games tend to push past two. 

She wonders if she could pick out Mae’s purple umbrella from this distance- Ruby bought it for her for her fourteenth birthday- but it’s impossible. She can see Dumbledore, though, bringing up the rear, chatting with Professor Witherspoon. 

Amy just hopes Mae is able to enjoy herself this year, hopes she hasn’t been steadily ruining her daughter’s school days with an ever encroaching tide of very adult problems and concerns. Mae shouldn’t have to worry about any of this, but fourteen… when did she get so old, so… teenaged?

In Amy’s head Mae is still ten or eleven and gap-toothed. Now she is… well, now Mae is fourteen, rapidly leaving childhood behind, shooting up in height, baby fat vanishing from her face, trading dimpled grins for cool looks, and growing out her dark hair again, childish headbands and costume jewelry long forgotten. Before long she’ll be fifteen, sixteen, seventeen-

There is some part of her, Amy knows, guiltily, that is dreading the day when Mae turns to her, and all that Amy can see is Tom, staring back at her, all sharp cheekbones and long, graceful neck and furrowed eyebrows, scrutinizing silently, head cocked slightly, deep in thought, lips pressed together. 

“Looks like the coast is clear,” Sidney says from behind her, pressing up against her. Amy rests her forehead against the cold glass pane for a moment, and he kisses her neck almost playfully. She reaches back and squeezes his hand, wishes she could give him more, say something profound like “I love you”. She can’t. 

They hurry down from the tower, not wanting to waste anytime, and Amy feels that same odd sense she always gets in a mostly empty castle, full right now only of talking portraits, clanking armor, and the odd passing ghost. 

Hogwarts has always been her home, but it is decidedly unhomely when it is deserted like this, and it raises her hackles to take the moving stairs down with Sidney and to hear no chatter of students around the corner, no distant footfall, no muffled din of voices from the Great Hall. 

But right now it’s for the best, as they cut a quick path to Carmody’s office. It will be locked, and likely warded against unlocking charms more powerful than Alohomora, but Mae has always found one consistent trick wizards never guard against, and that is a determined woman with bobby pins. Sidney looks on, impressed, watching the corridor, as Amy picks the lock in short order.

“Did you teach Mae that?” he asks jokingly, as she opens the door and motions him to follow her inside. 

“Wait, did you?”

Amy closes the door carefully behind them.

She’s never actually been inside this office before. Mae has served detention with Carmody once, but that was held in the classroom, and Amy has never sought June out to speak to her on her own time. 

Now she wishes she had. Surely it’d be easier to get on her good side and to find a time and place to drug her with Veritaserum if they were friends, or at least friendlier. But once she knew Carmody was spying for Tom, she was too worried about the risk it might pose to Mae. 

But she’s taking those same risks now, isn’t she? At the very least Mae is no longer a helpless little girl. Amy had her practice her shield charm with her this summer, inside the castle, and to at least start trying to disarm her. 

She wants her prepared, just in case. A fourteen year old witch still won’t stand a chance against most halfway decent duelists, but it’s better than nothing. She just wishes Mae could apparate. Maybe Dumbledore would be willing to teach her earlier? It’d be a weight off Amy’s shoulders.

Carmody’s office is darkened, the curtains drawn over the windows, and Amy doesn’t dare fuss with them. Instead she lights her wand, as does Sidney, and examines the small space more clearly. Her first thought is that it’s much tidier than her own office, which is a bit annoying. The bookshelves are immaculate, and the desk is neat and spartan, with no excess papers, pens, quills, or knick-knacks littered about. There’s a single plant on one corner, a cactus, which somehow seems oddly fitting. 

The only real personal items left out are some framed newspaper clipping of old duels June had against various international champions, and three small pictures on her desk. 

One is of June as a child, perhaps nine or ten, and it is obviously a muggle photo, because it doesn’t move and is black-and-white. It’s of her and a boy about her age, who must be a brother or cousin; the family resemblance is clear. They’re sitting together on the stop of some shop or pub, arms around each other, smiling broadly for the camera. 

The second is of a younger June and her husband Arthur, outside a court room. It must be their wedding photo; June is wearing a plain off-white, knee-length dress with matching hat and gloves, and Arthur is in a nice suit, though not a tuxedo. They look nervous and uncertain of themselves, eyes darting about, though they are holding hands tightly. Their faces are young and fresh and unlined; Mae has never seen Norbrook with all his hair before. 

The final picture is one of her son, Sean. It seems quite recent; he’s not an infant anymore, but a chubby child of one, staring wide-eyed at the camera and clutching a stuffed owl tightly to his chest with pudgy fists. He’s dressed up in a pair of Slytherin green overalls and has a tiny bow tie, and he is propped up on an armchair. As Amy stares down at it, his parents dart in and out of the frame, fussing over him; June kisses him on the head, then glances up accusingly at Amy and scoops her son up, hurrying out of frame with him. 

Amy jerks back as if stung, and resists the urge to turn the photos over so they can’t watch her and Sidney. 

Sidney has rifled through a few books, and now slides the last one back into place. “We don’t have time to search through every book on the shelves,” he says. “I say we check the desk. See if she has any correspondence at all in there. Anything even remotely connected to Gaunt. If you can get some dirt on her this way, you could make her come to you, not the other way around, and then slip her the uh…” he trails off, then blanches.

“You think she has anything listening spells on the room?”

Amy frowns, but closes her eyes, recalling a spell in Spanish Jaime Isola once taught her, and murmurs under her breath, guiding her wand around the room. Nothing lights up, so either she did it wrong, or they’re alright. 

“Well,” she says, “we’re in too deep as it is. And even if she realizes someone was in here, what is she going to do? Complain to Dippet?”

Sidney snorts. “He’ll tell her to change her locks. That’s what he told me, after Mick Applewhite broke into my office in his third year and glued my chair to the floor.”

“Mick Applewhite glued your chair to the floor?” Amy asks, bemused.

“Said it was on a dare. Little shit whined the whole detention I gave him after I caught him red-handed. He still had the glue on his fingers. Not our best and brightest, that one.”

“Don’t let his father hear you said that,” Amy murmurs. 

Sidney chuckles. “That’s one thing I’m glad of. No parent-teacher conferences.”

“Yet,” she says, approaching the desk. “I wouldn’t put it past Tony Nott to decide that’d be a brilliant idea. Get Lydia Rosier in on it, too. The two of them strutting about with clipboards while someone’s mother demands to know why we gave their darling an Acceptable on their OWL-,”

Amy jiggles the top drawer, then pulls back out her bobby pins. “This might take longer,” she says, through the one in her mouth. “Check some more of her books.”

He does so, and within a few minutes she has most of the drawers opened. Much of the contents are depressingly similar to what can be found in Amy’s own desk. Old homework assignments and tests, textbooks, workbooks, spare rolls of parchment and jars of ink. There’s a few toys and prank items that have been confiscated at one point or another, several packs of chewing gum and pairs of glasses left behind in class…

Amy is leery of moving things around too much, but she can feel her heart sinking. “There’s nothing here,” she says. “I knew it. She keeps her office clean of anything, just in case.”

“Well, we could always try a little breaking and entering at the Carmody residence,” Sidney suggests, then says, quickly, “I’m kidding. Really. That would be… a terrible idea.”

“Wait.” She’s got something. Amy triumphantly pries up a crumpled, envelope, before realizing it’s from the muggle post; there’s a stamp on it, and the return address is Birmingham. 

She hesitates, then slips out half of the worn letter inside, squinting down at the neat handwriting, though the ink has smeared and smudged. She recognizes it almost immediately, to her surprise; she’d know Eileen Prince’s slightly slanted cursive anywhere. 

_Dear June_ ,

 _Thank you again for the address you gave me back in July. Madam Ashbourne was very kind, like you said, and was able to render the service for a discount. Before you ask I am still in contact with Gringotts about the estate, but until I get a solicitor I am not sure there is much I can do. I don’t want the house or the money anyways. I would much rather make my own way, as you did._

_Madam Ashbourne gave me a recommendation for another witch I could stay with here in Birmingham and I am going to apply for a council flat with her help, as I don’t want to be a burden on anyone. (And I don’t want word getting out to the bloodhounds that I’m staying with this person or that). I know you think it’s silly of me but I think it best for me to live like a muggle for a few years so I can decide what I want to do with myself._

_Even if that means being poor and working hard. I can work and I will get a job somewhere as a shop girl, I am sure of it. People usually like my accent and I can read and write very well and count out change. Maybe I will get some money from my trust eventually and then I can buy a little flat and live like an artist. That might be fun._

_By the way, you will probably not be pleased to hear that I am still seeing Toby. I know you think it’s foolish and that we will never work, but I believe we can, just like you and Mr. Norbrook. You were only our age and from very different backgrounds but you still found love with each other. And he doesn’t expect perfection of me or for me to behave a certain way with people. The problem will not happen again, Madam Ashbourne gave me a prescription and I will be very diligent about it._

_Once again, I cannot thank you enough for the kindness you and Mr. Norbrook showed me by coming to check up on me after what happened to my parents. You were very generous and sweet and you did not have to be so good to me, when I’ve made so many mistakes._

_Yours sincerely,  
Eileen_

“So Eileen’s in Birmingham,” Sidney says thoughtfully, as Amy carefully folds the letter back up. “That’s… interesting. Poor girl. It’s a rough town; they’ll eat her alive.”

“I think she’s a bit more tenacious than that,” Amy says. “I checked the date; it’s only from a month ago.”

“So that inheritance hasn’t come through, then,” he shrugs. “Poor girl. Still, she never seemed too comfortable in her own skin- perhaps it’s for the best that she has a… split from that lifestyle. But what could she have gone to this Ashbourne woman about, I wonder-,”

“A pregnancy,” Amy says. 

Sid stares at her. “How do you know?”

“Because when-,” Amy stops herself, then says, in a forcibly casual tone, “I found out I was expecting when I was abroad, and though I was much further along than she likely was, I did… I considered coming back to England and seeing if… if it wasn’t too late for something to be done about it. And her name came up, Ashbourne. Of course, they’ll do it at St. Mungo’s, too, but not without a lot of questions and answers first. She was no questions asked.”

Sidney is quiet for a moment; she wonders if he’s disgusted or appalled with her. 

“Eighteen is very young to be a mother,” is all he says, at last. “For Eileen and for you, I imagine.”

“Yes,” says Amy. “Well. My mother was sixteen. Or fifteen. I was never quite sure how old. It’s one family tradition I’d rather Mae not repeat.” Her face flares up red; she hadn’t meant to actually say that aloud. 

She puts the letter back in the drawer, slams it shut. “It’s possible Gaunt had her follow up with Eileen, make sure she didn’t know anything incriminating.”

“Well,” says Sidney. “It’s better than nothing. If you can catch her off guard, get her somewhere private…” he trails off. “You’ll have to separate her from Arthur. Her husband. There’s a very good chance he’ll be there, won’t he?”

Amy scowls. “Yes. But you can take him, can’t you? You and Iris? She loves to talk, and you love to wind her up. If you can distract him while I get her away from the party…”

“God, we sound completely nefarious,” Sidney says. “Excellent.” He shrugs innocently at her look. “Come on. You haven’t been dying to get your hands dirty, just a little?”

Amy smiles thinly as she relocks the drawers, one by one. There’s a distant roar, heard even from here, from the Quidditch pitch. Someone’s just scored. “Just a bit.”

HOGWARTS, NOVEMBER 1960

The day after an uneventful Monday Hallowe’en, Mae gets a nasty fright when she meets Ambrose for his regular tutoring in the library.

He’s brought Marian with him, and she has a Look on her face. 

Mae is very familiar with Marian’s looks by now. Marian gets this sort of look when she’s considering a very difficult Transfiguration problem, or trying to finish a history essay. It’s not a defeated or annoyed look, but it is a troubled, scrutinizing one. 

Usually it’s reserved for Christine, when she’s having a fit about something and needs to calm down before she gives herself spots, or for Valerie, as of late, who’s been so withdrawn and sullen, throwing herself into quidditch practice and spending long hours out on her broom when not in class, coming back soaked to the skin from wind and rain. 

They have a table in the very back of the library, near the Restricted Section, well away from anyone looking for books or chatting with their friends while they study. 

Mae looks between Ambrose, who seems a little queasy, his hands in loose fists on the table, and Marian, who looks like she’s about to make her case before a court of law, hands clasped neatly in front of her, sitting up very straight. 

“What?” Mae demands as she sits down, pulling out her Transfiguration textbook. “What is it? Finally found a problem set you can’t do, Mari?”

Marian arches a thick dark eyebrow but says nothing, exchanging a glance with Ambrose. Mae doesn’t like that, either. Now Ambrose is turning more red than his usual pasty white. 

“Alright,” she says. “Don’t tell me you’re dating. I really, really don’t want to-,”

“We’re not dating,” Marian snaps, at the same time Ambrose stammers, “Wh-why would you think that?”

Mae scowls; she’d actually been almost hoping it was that. She has a bad feeling about this. She lowers her voices as she pulls out her paper and pens. “Then what is it? Spill it.” If there’s one thing she can’t stand, just like her mother, it’s people taking forever to get to the bloody point. Indecisiveness and people being wishy-washy, hedging their bets, enrages her, and makes her want to tear her hair out.

But whatever it is, Ambrose and Marian seem unwilling to say it aloud. After looking around as if expecting to see Madam Rutherford come careening around a corner, Ambrose finally scribbles something on a slip of paper and slides it to her. Mae almost wants to laugh at his messy scrawl; he has the handwriting of an eight year old, honestly- Until she reads what it says. 

Is Minister Gaunt your father

Circle yes or no

She looks back up, fighting to keep her expression even, but she suspects the glassy, panicked look in her eyes gives her away. No, no, no. No. This is not happening. How could they- Ambrose. That little shit. He must have gotten the truth from someone. He knows she’s a parselmouth. She pulls her wand, and his chair screeches back in dismay. 

“Hey- no, Mae, don’t-,”

A few books topple off the shelf behind him as he ducks. 

“Stop it!” Marian hisses at her. 

“You stop it!” Mae whispers back. “Are you mad? Have you lost your minds? Of- of course he’s not my- are you insane? Why would you even- my father is dead!”

She thinks of Frank Shelby’s sketched face, already blurring in her memory. She hasn’t looked at that picture of him in several years now. 

“I told you,” Ambrose is muttering to Marian, “I told you this was a bad idea-,”

“Well, you’re bloody right about that!” Mae resists the urge to throw her textbook at his stupid face, despite the fact that he is twice her size. 

Marian’s face hardens; she stands up suddenly. “Let’s not have this conversation here,” she says, sounding like a professor. “Into the Restricted Section. Come on.”

That surprises Mae almost as much as their stupid note, which is crumpled up in her trembling palm. “We can’t-,”

“Rutherford’s on her lunch break, there’s barely anyone in here,” Marian says. “Let’s go. No one will hear us there.”

The Restricted Section is gated off, but the thing about it is that the gate is old and broken down and so can’t properly shut all the way. There’s a gap in the middle chained together, but it’s just large enough for anyone who isn’t a big burly man to potentially slip through, though not without a good deal of rattling. 

Marian casts a muffling charm, getting rid of that problem. 

Mae knows she should leave. Leave them, leave the library entirely, tell Mum- tell her what? That she was stupid, and messed up, and now two of her friends know the truth? Her stomach turns over, and she slips through the gap. Maybe she can talk them out of it. Convince them they misunderstood. Maybe Mum knows someone who can do a memory charm. Or something. 

The Restricted Section is a windowless part of the library, and it’s much darker here once you go down the stone steps into the lower level. 

Mae leans her back against one of the dusty shelves, and crosses her arms against her chest, trying to look annoyed but not shaken up, ignoring the spots of color in her cheeks. 

“Look,” Ambrose says, seeing the dark expression on her face. “We’re not- well- it’s only Marian and I had gotten to talking about the wedding- the Minister’s wedding, I mean, to my cousin Lydia, and… and it just sort of slipped out that you… that you were a-,”

“A parselmouth,” Mae says in a hard tone. “So what? That doesn’t have anything to do with the Minister.”

“You said you wanted to be there to spy on him,” Marian says. “That your mum and him were enemies.”

“You think I was lying?” Mae retorts. “Okay, so it wasn’t the best plan- I was a kid! I was just a stupid kid, I was twelve-,”

“I don’t think you were lying,” Marian says. “But I started thinking about how your mum and him might be enemies, and why… why she might have come back here with you in the first place, if she’s so afraid of him. Wouldn’t she want to protect you? Your her daughter. Her only daughter. Wouldn’t she be afraid of him hurting you?”

“She is!” And Mae know she’s lost the battle then, because the raw pain in her voice was right there, like an exposed wound. 

Ambrose actually looks like he feels sorry for her. She hates him. 

“There’s loads of rumors that Gaunt is a parselmouth. Or comes from parselmouths,” he says, “and then… when my cousin Lydia visited Hogwarts, once, she- she had all these questions when I mentioned you-,”

“You shouldn’t have,” Marian tells him sternly, and he flushes all the more.

“Well, I know that now, obviously-,”

“He’s your father,” Marian says. “Biologically, I mean.” It’s not a question. “Your mum came back here to get help protecting you from him. From Dumbledore and the other professors. Everyone knows Dumbledore’s one of the most powerful warlocks in Europe. You wanted to go to the wedding because you wanted to see your father.”

“I didn’t know- I didn’t know, then,” Mae says. She shouldn’t be saying anything, but it’s as if the floodgates have been broken down. She hasn’t been able to talk to anyone about this- anyone at all, besides Mum, and how many times can they have the same tense conversation?

Marian’s face creases in sympathy. “I’m sorry, Mae-,”

“Shut up,” snaps Mae. “Just- shut up! You don’t get to lecture me- I mean it, Marian, you don’t get to drag me down here and lecture me about how my father’s some monster-,”

“We just want to help,” Ambrose begins, in a much chastened tone.

“How are you helping?” Mae sneers at him. “How have you helped me, Bulstrode? I’ve gotten you through three years of Transfiguration, I duel with you- I’ve done loads more for you than you’ve ever done for me. You should have kept my name out of your mouth when talking to your cousin, for one! What if she knows?”

“Does he know?” Marian presses. “Your-,”

“Yes,” snarls Mae. “Yes, alright, he knows! Are you happy now? He knows, and he wants to- I don’t know what he wants, he wants my mum to break down and go crazy and admit she never should have left, and he wants me to love him like he’s been my dear old dad all along! And trust me, if he knew the two of you knew, he’d kill you.”

Marian suddenly looks much less certain of herself, and Ambrose looks genuinely frightened. 

Mae’s glad of it. “He’d kill you,” she says, “and not just you, your parents, your siblings- he’d kill all of them. You think he wants it getting out that he had a bastard daughter with a mudblood? That wouldn’t do too well for his career, would it!” 

There’s a long, horrible silence, and then Mae asks, hoarsely, “So what? Does Valerie know? Have you gone and told Christine yet? Because that’s just what I needed!”

“Valerie thinks it’s odd that all her letters to you got through this summer,” Marian says. “But I don’t think… I don’t think she wants to know, either way, if you and your mum have anything to do with the Minister-,”

“Right, like we chose this,” Mae scoffs furiously.

“Your mum did,” Ambrose mutters, resentful of looking afraid, probably. 

She doesn’t care. She sees red, for an instant, and slaps him, hard. It’s not a girlish little smack, it’s a vicious blow. He stumbles back in shock, and Mae raises a hand to hit him again, but Marian grabs her arm. 

Mae shoves her away, rips a heavy old book off the shelf behind her, and hits Ambrose with it until he slides down onto his haunches, crying out in pain. Marian is shouting at her, but she doesn’t hear her, until suddenly there’s footsteps above them. 

“Children!” Rutherford is calling sharply down the steps. “Is someone down there?! Get up here, this instant!”

Ambrose is crying, big fat tears. It’s like beating a circus bear that forgot how to bite and claw. He could have easily hit back, and seriously hurt her, he’s so much bigger, but he didn’t. 

“Why did you do that?” Marian demands, voice shrill with fear, of them getting caught or of Mae. 

“Why do you have to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong?” Mae snaps, uncaring of if this lands her in detention for a month or not. She can hear the gate rattling. 

“Because I’m your friend and I wanted to help you!”

“Some help this was,” Mae retorts, and stalks forward, lighting up her wand. “We’re right here, Madam Rutherford!”

Marian mutters something behind her, and she can hear Ambrose sniffling as he gets back to his feet, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care at all. See if she ever speaks to either of them again, just see. How could they do this to her? It’s not fair. It’s not fair that she should have to hide things, while everyone else gets to have their happy little family. 

It’s not fair and she’s sick of being brave and noble about it. The next time she sees Tom Gaunt, she’s going to make him jerk and writhe like those illustrations of the Cruciatus Curse in her Defence textbook. See how much he wants to be her father then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I have Chapter 43 already written but I need to start Chapter 44 which picks up right where 43 left off, so hopefully we update again next weekend. 
> 
> 2\. I wanted to show that Tom is not always the only one caught up in memories of Amy, and as of late Amy has been feeling herself slip up more and more in that regard. 
> 
> 3\. Being able to cast a full blown patronus is pretty rare and Amy is no different in that regard; she has never seen her full corporeal patronus. 
> 
> 4\. While Eileen should have rightfully inherited her parents' pretty big fortune, their former business partners have closed in like sharks, the will is mysteriously missing, etc. The pureblood elite are being as corrupt as always, and Eileen hasn't really been around to contest it, having run away and pretty much hopping around the muggle world. 
> 
> 5\. Several chapters back Mae overheard Eileen trying to get birth control from Madam Amell in the infirmary (though Mae did not realize that's what was going on), and now we see that June stepped in and helped Eileen get an abortion, as she'd wound up pregnant by a muggle boy she'd been secretly dating. 
> 
> 6\. Getting a 'circle yes or no' note is an integral part of everyone's childhoods, right? 
> 
> 7\. Okay so obviously this was not the best plan Marian and Ambrose ever had, confronting Mae out of the blue about her father's identity, but in their defense... they are 14 haha. Mae freaking the fuck out and hitting Ambrose... also not cool. 
> 
> 8\. Next chapter we'll see quite a bit of Lydia, Therese, June, and Amy, so that should be fun.


	43. Lydia IX - Amy XX

LANCASHIRE, DECEMBER 1960

The unnatural glow of the aquarium is turning the faces of the little girls a garish green. Lydia watches from her seat by the window; Polly’s head is resting in her lap, while Art sleeps at her feet, her tail occasionally whipping against the rug. The dogs aren’t usually allowed in the drawing room, but her mother is otherwise occupied with Cecily’s childbirth, and her father has always been a bit more soft on the animals. 

She studies him now; it startles her how much Gilbert Rosier has aged in the nearly three years since her marriage. He seems… shrunken, somehow, though he was never the most imposing man to begin with, more short and round-shouldered than tall and lithe. Then again, no one ever made the claim that the Rosiers were known for their great beauty. Leave that to the Blacks and Malfoys, when they aren’t being born with six fingers because they married one too many first cousins in the last century. 

Her young cousins are playing beneath the aquarium with little Caroline, though it seems more like them ordering her about. Bella, the oldest at nine, has of course taken total control, and claimed Caroline’s oversized dollhouse for her own, lining up the tiny figures execution style as she doles out snappish orders to her sisters and tiny Caro, who is sucking on her thumb. Bad habit, that, but she’s spoiled terribly by an anxious, depressive mother and a father who frequently smells of alcohol. 

Lyle wasn’t allowed to slink off to his club today, on account of it being so close to Christmas, and the solstice. Tess is convinced that’s a good omen, that this child is being born on the first day of winter. In the old days, they would have been feasting and celebrating now. 

Yule. She knows the Blacks still go put on a good show of it, though they can no longer sacrifice a few house elves without drawing serious Ministry ire. Go back far enough, and they wouldn’t have bothered with the elves at all; they’d have their own Wild Hunt chasing nubile young maidens through the forest, or something like that. 

So they claim. Lydia’s read some of the history books, and it not all a glorious parade of magical supremacy, wizards living like kings and dying like gods- slowly. There are other stories, too. In some of those stories the muggles fought back, and tore down sorcerers’ towers brick by brick, or barricaded shrieking witches in their own feasting halls and set them ablaze. 

Or, failing that, turned their rage onto their lowly peasant neighbors, the innocent hedge witch practicing healing, the young boy who had visions of the future. 

Well, Lydia will not be slitting the throats of goats or pigs tonight. She will not be sprinkling herself with blood and weaving garlands in her hair. She will not be toasting to the gods wizards and witches once liked to claim had blessed them with abundance and power; the gods who conveniently offered no divine intercession when the tides turned against them, and the muggles realized that while they were weak, they were many, and the witches were very, very few. 

What she will be doing is trudging over to Hogwarts for the silly little school gala arranged by Nott; with Father Christmas-esque intentions. He’s been asking for donations for months now, for presents for the children, to which Lydia has neatly written out several hefty checks, telling Tom it will be worth the good publicity. 

She’s planning on being fashionably late, staying for an hour or so, making the rounds, perhaps finding an excuse to have a little chat with Professor Benson, getting a good look at her husband’s bastard child to make sure the resemblance isn’t too overwhelming now that the girl is older, and then… 

Well, it’s the middle of the week. There’s not much else planned except for the annual Ministry party on Christmas Eve.

“MESP gala is canceled,” her father informs her, without looking up from his copy of the Daily Prophet. 

Lydia blinks, surprised he addressed her without prompting, and that he actually cared enough to comment on the news. Usually he just grumbles to himself. 

“Why?” she asks, leaning over to get a better look at the paper. 

He shoots a meaningful glance at the children playing nearby; then shows her the headlines.

AVERY ESTATE ROCKED BY SUSPECTED WEREWOLF ATTACK: FITZWILLIAM AVERY IN CRITICAL CONDITION, ST. MUNGO’S REPORTS, GEORGE AVERY FOUND DEAD.

Lydia can’t help but blanche; she doesn’t know the Averys well, but Derbyshire is rather far south, for her liking. 

“What would werewolves be doing around Bakewell?” she demands under her breath. “That’s- it’s hardly the thick of the forest, is it?”

“They fell upon them while they were out on a Yule hunt.”

“Hunting what?” she inquires sharply. 

“Fox,” he says, with a droll edge. “Very muggle pastime, that. I told Fitz, years ago, I said- listen, it is time to hang up the cap, you know you’re a piss-poor shot with that wand, and the upkeep of those damn dogs alone-,”

Polly whines, and Art cracks open an eyelid. 

“Not you, darlings,” Lydia shushes them, and leans back in her seat, unsettled, as her father returns to his reading. 

She’d asked Tom about what he meant to do about the wolves, once, over the summer, but he’d seemed incredulous at the question, and informed he had far larger concerns than ‘a pack of overgrown mongrels rummaging through the bins and causing a fuss with the aurors. 

In fact, he’d seemed almost pleased for the distraction and merry chase it was giving the aurors department, what with all the hysteria around magical creatures. Long gone are the days when wizards were taming wild beasts or treating with faeries. 

Now they’d much rather not have to deal with any of them, ever, and almost resent the muggles for being able to write them off as mere folklore. After all, muggles have never had wars with goblins or giants, at least not wars that they remember. 

“Is Mr. Avery going to die, now?” Bella asks loudly, deciding to broadcast that she has, in fact, been eavesdropping with those big ears of hers. “Does that mean Fred Avery inherits everything?”

“For Merlin’s sake,” her father mutters to himself, refusing to engage. 

“Bella. Darling.” Lydia forces a smile. “It’s impolite to discuss people dying.”

“It’s not like we’re in public,” Bellatrix sighs, put-upon, the nine year old eternally exasperated with adults’ reasoning. “I was just asking.”

“Bella has a crush on the Avery boys,” Andromeda is not to be out-done. 

“You stupid!” Bellatrix tries to smack her. “No I don’t!”

Andromeda dodges the blow, and throws one of Caroline’s dolls at her. Caroline bursts into tears, while Narcissa covers her ears, looking exhausted, for a five year old. 

There’s a noise from the stairwell, and Lydia shoots the girls a venomous look, complete with a throat slashing motion, that temporarily cows them into submission, just as Tess comes into the room. Her face is blank with spent nerves. Lydia’s father set downs his newspaper in anticipation.

“Another girl,” she says, neutrally. 

He sighs and picks the paper back up. 

Lydia exhales, and stands, ignoring the greyhounds’ whining. She follows Therese out into the hall. “How was the labor?” 

“Much quicker than last time,” Therese says. “Druella and your mother are in with her now. Lyle is writing the announcement. She’s… quite distraught.”

“She’s gotten with child twice in three years,” Lydia says shortly. “Surely they can manage it a third time.”

“As did Druella and Cygnus,” says Tess. “Look what it got them.” She lowers her voice. “Three girls.” She sighs, sounding disappointed but not angry, then says. “Well. Of course you’re right. They’re clearly capable of having healthy children. Third time is the charm, perhaps.” She pauses, and then confesses, almost- at least it feels like a confession, from the almost guilty flash in her green eyes, “If it’s too much bother, I could always take on the little one for a while.”

Lydia frowns, and feels something sharp pressing into her chest, like a thin blade. “Caroline?” Her voice hardens slightly, despite her straight face. 

“No,” says Tess, dismissively. “The infant, of course. You know your mother has no interest in babies, never has, and Cecily has Caroline to look after. And really, it’s unhealthy to have house elves playing nursemaid. Obscene, really.”

Lydia can’t speak for a moment, then says, breathlessly, “You think they’d just- what? Hand over their daughter to you to raise for a few years?”

Therese frowns. “It’s not as if I haven’t done it before.”

Something about the sheer casual lightness of her tone. It unwinds something that was already running short, like a spool of thread. 

Lydia has to rock back a step on her heels, then says, before she can restrain herself- she’s so tired of biting her tongue, constantly restraining herself- “Then I suppose I should count myself lucky you didn’t get a hold of me until I was nearly five, then.”

Her aunt stares at her for a moment, her gaze roving Lydia’s flushing face, then seems to decide it must have been a slightly rude joke. “Don’t be ridiculous. You and I both know you were much better off with me-,”

“I was not,” Lydia says. “I was certainly not.” It comes out fast and shrill, like a child’s voice. 

Tess scowls. “Lydia. You’re being absurd.”

“I’m being realistic, which is something you’ve always advised,” Lydia says, quickly. “I- I’m sure you thought it was for the best, but the older I get-,”

“The older you get? You’re still barely more than a girl,” she scoffs.

“I am a married woman, I have a career-,”

Tess takes her firmly by the elbow, and to Lydia’s shame, she lets her aunt pull her close. Her breaths fans out warm and venomous on Lydia’s face, and for an instant, those jade green eyes turn a much darker, murkier shade. The depths of the forest, where something terrible is waiting, with many rows of teeth and claws like razors. 

“You,” she says, “are what I made you. And sometimes I wonder that it still wasn’t enough. You’re married to the most powerful wizard in Britain and what do you have to show for it? No child. Few friends- you have completely isolated yourself since this marriage, and it reflects poorly on you, not him, my dear, for letting it go straight to your head. Do you think you’re some sort of celebrity? You aren’t. To hear you talk- your career, Lydia? Learn to accept charity with some shame. He tolerates you playing secretary with my husband at the DOME. He does not like it. What man would? To hear that he isn’t enough for you-,”

“He isn’t,” Lydia blinks back hot tears. She didn’t mean to say that, either.

Therese’s grip on her tightens, her nails digging into the fabric of Lydia’s blouse. “He should be,” she all but hisses. “You have no concept of how fortunate you are. You are a privileged, self-absorbed, silly little girl who cannot stand to not be the center of attention. What did you think you were signing up for, marrying him? Agreeing to this life? Accolades and honors? You are supposed to be a support, a helpmeet-,”

“He doesn’t want my support,” Lydia snaps, “and he only wants my help when he needs me to- to spy for him, put on someone else’s face-,”

“Then you should be grateful for it! For him! And for me, that I gave you the tools-,”

“I didn’t want your tools,” Lydia jerks away, throat aching; there’s a hard lump in it, like a stone. She wipes at her eyes quickly, trying to compose herself. “I didn’t want- I didn’t want any of this, no one asked me, no one’s ever cared what I-,”

“What you want?” Tess sneers. “Yes. Welcome to reality, darling. It doesn’t matter. I am trying to give you advice, you stupid girl, and Merlin help me, sometimes I do think you married too young. Another few years with-,”

“With you?” Lydia draws further away from her. “No. Do you know why I was so eager? For the wedding? To get away from this,” she gestures wildly to the pristine hallway, full of scowling portraits and antique vases, “from you! To be my own woman-,”

“Not one of us is our own man or woman,” Tess says. “If you’ve failed to learn that, I have nothing else for you. You- your entire generation. You’re absurd. You think everything revolves around you, around your desires. It doesn’t. Some things are more important. Family. Children-,”

“And how is Valerie?” Lydia retorts furiously. “Warmed up to you yet? Do you write her letters? Ask her to call you Mummy? Did you ever ask me? I confess, I can’t remember-,”

“Watch yourself,” Therese growls at her. 

“Or what?” Lydia snaps. “What? You’ll lock me in my room? Make me polish the floors? Or- ooh, I’ve got it, will you tell me to go run and fetch the tea kettle-,”

Her aunt recoils as if slapped, just as there’s a pounding at the door. They exchange glances, and Lydia stalks past her, into the foyer, to open it. There’s an icy late afternoon sleet coming down inside, but Tom is completely dry as he steps inside, shrugging off his hat and overcoat. 

“What’s wrong?” he says, seeing her flushed face, and then seeing Therese, watching them, draws her close and kisses her almost tenderly. “You’re hot,” he says. “Do you feel alright? It’s not the baby, is it?” He has flowers in his hand, for Cecily, no doubt. He’s always been good about that sort of thing.

“The baby is perfectly well,” Tess says. “Welcome, Tom. It’s a girl.”

“Ah,” says Tom. “Well, daughters are easier, aren’t they?”

You would know, Lydia thinks. Instead she says, “We’re just a bit frazzled here, is all. Are those for Cecily?”

“No, I thought I’d send some over tomorrow, once the birth announcement has gone out,” he says. “They’re for you, of course.” He smiles so genuinely she almost believes it. Would have, when they were still engaged. Would have convinced herself he did really, truly mean it. 

“Whatever for?” Tess asks, barely able to keep the hostility from her voice.

If Tom notes it, he doesn’t react. “I thought I’d be your date tonight,” he tells Lydia, instead. “To that little party at the school.” He manages to make it sound so casual. “Unless you mind?” A small smile plays on his lips, but there is something else in his dark eyes. She almost wrenches away from him.

Instead she says, “No, that would be splendid. I’ve been wanting to bring you down to the school for ages, darling. We’ll come a bit later, Auntie, you’ll let Uncle Tony know, won’t you? Will you be there?”

“Of course,” Therese says coldly. “I wouldn’t dream of missing it for the world.” She turns on her heel and walks back into the drawing room, shutting the door behind her.

Tom studies her as she goes, then says, more seriously, to Lydia, “Something has her riled, then.”

“Women of certain age, certain hormones…” Lydia trails off at his disgusted look. “Poor thing. You’re lucky, you know. No mothers or aunts fussing over you.” 

That was a low blow, and he seems a little shocked at her nerve, but doesn’t rise to the bait. “For tonight,” he says, instead, taking her hand in his, “I thought… the silver and white one, with the red sash? I’ll wear the matching cufflinks, and my red robes.”

“Tonight,” she says, “Yes. Yesterday, you had no intention of coming. I thought you’d be busier. It’s the middle of the week.”

“Yes,” he says. “Well, break it up a bit, why don’t we? And we won’t stay long, of course. Just make the rounds. Keep Dumbledore on his toes. Reassure Dippet we’re not there to burn books and confiscate their chalkboards.”

“No,” says Lydia, feeling strangely unpresent in her own body, like she could say or do whatever she liked. “Just to see our old flames, then?”

He reacts as with doused with cold water, and lets go of her, barely restraining a glare. “That is not what this is about, Lydia.” He lowers his voice even further, to barely above a whisper. “And this is not the place to-,”

“To discuss it, yes. Because we’ve done so much of that at home.” She intends to let this wave of reckless feeling carry her for as long as it might last. “Tell me one thing, though, what is the plan here, Tom? You’ll make eyes at her from the other side of the room? Ask her child for a daddy daughter dance? Every little girl’s dream, swept away in the Minister’s arms-,”

“Get a hold of yourself.” Now he is pure ice and fury. 

“I will,” she murmurs. “Once you tell me, reasonably speaking, what you intend to do with her? With them? Because we were treading on thin ice a few years ago. Now you’re in the cold water, Tom. And if you don’t pull yourself out, you just might start to sink.”

She would like to say more, would like to really lay out every grievance, now that she has him on tenterhooks, but the moment is past. He takes her by the arm now, not the hand, and none-so-gently pushes her back into the closed door. From a distance, it might look as though they were sharing a close, private embrace, whispering sweet nothings. 

“I certainly hope that wasn’t your idea of a threat,” he says, and his face is as close as her aunt’s was a few minutes ago, though it could not be more different; there is nothing lurking in the forests of his eyes, because they aren’t forests at all, but dark, stifling soil. Grave dirt, she thinks, for a moment, and almost laughs. 

“Sorry,” she says. “Did I forget to mention we were both in the water?” She holds up her hand with her wedding ring, but he wrenches it back down. 

“She’s not a threat,” he says. “She’d like to believe herself one. In reality, she’s a frightened woman in well over her head, and has been for some time.” His lip curls. “Perhaps you should take a leaf from her book, Lydia.” His point is very clear.

“Oh,” she says softly. “Now that was a threat. Thank you for the demonstration.”

He lets go of her. 

“We’ll talk about this at home,” he says, turning from her, straightening his shirt sleeves. He starts to walk into the house, then stops, and waits for her to follow.

Lydia forces a game smile, and does so, the hairs on the back of her neck still standing up. 

HOGWARTS, DECEMBER 1960

According to Kalliope Witherspoon, the last time Hogwarts held a dance for the students it was in the peak of the 1920s. Apparently someone spiked the punch with a Well Humored Elixir and they had to shut down the entire party two hours into the night, because some students were giggling so hard they’d begun to convulse, while others were floating up near the ceiling. 

Looking at the Great Hall like this vaguely brings to mind the more wild Samhain celebrations that were the norm when she was a student, but even then, they were largely confined to the village, for the older students. And Amy can’t recall the last time she saw the long house tables completely removed from the hall like this. 

It makes her realize just how large this hall is; no diminutive dining room, but a proper medieval castle hall, only on a massive enough scale to hold a thousand students, a dozen professors, and half a dozen ghosts flitting in and out, acting as additional chaperones. Save for Peeves, of course, who is lurking under the drinks table, ready to pop out and scare the first years. 

Snowflakes spiral down from the overcast night sky above them, though they never reach the floor, melted by the candles floating in the air or by the sheer heat the hall produces when every single large hearthfire is lit. Amy wonders if this is what it looked like in the very old days, when Hogwarts was no more than four powerful sorcerers and just shy of thirty students. They say in the first class, in the Middle Ages, there were but seven children in each house. Vera once wondered aloud, when they were students, why none of the Founders had ever stayed on as ghosts, so they could watch their school flourish and grow over the years. 

Amy thinks, aside from the whole philosophical matter of whether it’s cowardice to fear what comes after death, that it may have been a more mundane sort of anxiety: what if it failed? What if all their hard work was for nothing? Did they really want to hang around to see that happen? There are not even portraits of the Founders to be found anywhere in the school, just the massive tapestries that hang behind the head table. 

Magic has made them just as vibrant as they were the day they were woven, but they’d not yet developed the spells to animate and breathe life into the art then, so they are the only ones in the castle that are completely frozen, deaf and dumb. 

She studies them now; Godric Gryffindor, from wild moor, stands tall and galant, a Cornish stone circle woven into the golden-green background behind him, in sharp contrast with the brilliant scarlet and gold of his armor, the snarling lion’s head of his helm under his arm. 

They say he hailed from St Breward, where legend claims King Arthur first erected his noble hall. Gryffindor’s magnificent yellow curls and beard are as lively as the rich golden brown of his eyes, and he smiles confidently, the ruby-encrusted pommel of his sword just visible behind his back. He is the only founder dressed for war. 

Helga Hufflepuff, from valley broad, is seated in a throne-like chair carved from the great trunk of a tree, only the oak still flourish above her, and wildflowers and vines snake up the sides of her seat and grasp at her clothes. The fertile Vale of Glamorgan stretches about behind her; Amy can’t read Welsh, so she has no idea what is engraved on the witch’s seat in golden yellow lettering. 

Her robes are a soft, buttery yellow embellished with black brocade, and her face is plump and round and soft; a mother’s face. An unknown child sits in her lap, clutching her golden cup, and a badger snuffles at her slippered feet, while a lark chips on her shoulder. Her auburn hair falls in a thick plait across her other shoulder, and a woven crown of grass rests atop her head. 

Rowena Ravenclaw, from glen, stands on a balcony, her astronomer’s tools and stacks of books spread out around her. A fearsome looking eagle rests on her outstretched arm, about to take off, its talons digging into the lush fabric of her midnight blue mantle. Her glittering diadem casts a halo around her long, beautiful face; her dark brown hair is contained by a net of shimmering sapphires. 

She is the only founder not looking straight ahead, but glancing back towards the background behind her, the Great Glen Albyn and the blue River Ness snaking through it. Above it, the night sky sparkles with stars and the harvest moon hangs round and ripe. 

And finally Salazar Slytherin, from fen. His is perhaps the most foreboding; he is standing on a small island in the middle of an Irish fen. Slender willow trees sprout up behind him, and the visible patches of water and dark and murky, reflecting the storm clouds overhead. The wind seems to tear at his dark green robes, and he stares defiantly down at the viewer; not smiling like Gryffindor or Hufflepuff, nor distracted like Ravenclaw, but fiercely focused on his adversary. 

He wears no weapons save the glimpse of an ornate jeweled shillelagh turned wizard’s staff in his left hand, and the silver locket dangling from his right fist. His hair is black as raven’s wings and slicked back from the rain, his beard sharp and pointed, and his eyes are a piercing unnaturally dark green. Snakes hiss at his feet, and one emerges from his sleeve, but the most intimidating aspect of his appearance is still that cold, narrow stare. 

“Well,” Iris says at her elbow, startling Amy. “What do we think of this affair?”

Amy turns away from the tapestries to regard the hall full of bored looking adults, milling students, a few dancing to the band the Notts hired, who appear to be half alive, half dead (in the most literal sense, the singer seems to be a skeleton, though his voice is quite good), and pompous Ministry officials. It’s impossible to make Mae out in this crowd, but she knows she’s here somewhere. 

Amy had assumed the worst was over, after all the trouble Mae stirred up during her second year, but of course that was just wishful thinking. Mae is still a teenager, after all, and got into some trouble last month when Madam Rutherford found her, Marian Darvesh, and Ambrose Bulstrode wandering about the Restricted Section in the middle of the day. 

Amy has no idea what they were up to, going down there; she’d have expected Mae to have the common sense to try to sneak in at night- but whatever happened, Mae refuses to talk about it, and is clearly on the outs with Marian; they no longer speak to each other in Amy’s class, at least. 

Amy still can’t quite get over seeing Mae exchange pleasant small talk with Christine Applewhite, who she once claimed was ‘the most annoying girl I’ve ever met’, while coldly ignoring Marian Darvesh, who’s never been in a spot of trouble in her life, aside from the two weeks detention Rutherford gave her and the others. As for Bulstrode, well, he ignores Amy’s gaze most days anyways; she assumes he’s been told multiple times by his pureblood parents what an unfit teacher she is. 

They certainly wrote a quite irritated letter when he got his final marks for third year, demanding to know why their precious baby boy wasn’t top of the class. Ambrose has about as much skill brewing potions as your average hedgehog might. That’s not to say he’s dimwitted, but it’s… not the subject for him. Either way, Amy cannot micromanage Mae’s friendships, as much as she might like to. She’s fourteen now, not a little girl anymore, as she keeps reminding her mother, and if she has a falling out with someone, than it’s her choice to make amends or not. 

“Well,” says Amy, nursing her cup of eggnog. “I can’t say they didn’t try.”

While there’s still four days to Christmas, the Great Hall is full of evergreens decked out in ornaments and pixies, and the largest of them, in the back of the hall, has heaps and heaps of wrapped presents under it, a large enough pile for a first year to get lost in. She may loathe the Notts on principle, but she can’t say they didn’t put their money where their mouth is; they must have spent an enormous sum on financing this party, between the decorations, food, and toys for the children. 

Almost as enormous a sum, she reckons sourly, as the Ministry has spent taking another twenty or so muggleborn first years away from their family before this term. It’s only a matter of time before they simply make it a blanket ruling, that no muggle family is fit to raise magical children, that all of them should be rehomed as soon as their names appear on the school list. 

Next thing you know, they’ll be snatching babies from new parents, wiping away all memories of hope and joy and excitement and leaving them befuddled, staring at an empty nursery, or worse, convinced their child is dead. She can’t imagine they were able to successfully erase all evidence of every muggleborn child taken so far. At some point, they must have had to go for a more convenient approach; the memories are real, but your son or daughter is simply no more. 

If someone had done that to her, with Mae… her grip on her cup tightens.

“Careful,” says Iris, under her breath. “Let’s not shatter any glasses this early into the evening.”

Amy scans the hall once more. Dippet has been talking to the Notts for what seems like ages, while Dumbledore is engrossed in conversation with Arthur Norbrook. June Carmody is speaking to Sidney, who is slouching a little against a wall, looking bored out of his mind. Witherspoon is gesturing with her cup of mulled wine as she speaks excitably to Madam Amell. The other professors are largely patrolling the room, making sure students aren’t sneaking off to go snog in darkened corridors or roam the castle after hours, free of prefects on duty. 

“There’s a rumor going around that Lydia Gaunt will drop in,” Iris says to her. “And that the darling husband might be her plus-one.”

Amy scoffs. “He wouldn’t dare. He hasn’t-,” she almost said, ‘he hasn’t so much as set foot in Hogsmeade’, but that’s not true at all, is it? “He wouldn’t come, Gaunt,” she says. “The wife, maybe, but him- Dumbledore still frightens him.”

“Is it Dumbledore?” Iris muses; the torchlight catches at the cheery salmon pink of her hairpin lace cocktail dress, the scalloped bodice gleaming. “Or does the school itself frighten him, do you think?”

“What do you mean?” Amy asks, confused.

“Well,” Iris takes another sip of her drink. “He’s supposed to be the ultimate self-made man, isn’t he? That’s what he was elected in on. But this is where he came from. Really. Where he was made. Being sorted into Slytherin, Slug Club, friendships with all those pureblood snots… What would he be, without Hogwarts? I think that must be terrifying, in a sense, don’t you?”

She’d never thought of it like that. “I… I don’t know. I suppose.”

“Ah, I’m the Divination professor, you know I’m right,” Iris chuckles. Then she sobers, her sharp blue eyes returning to the hall. “There. Now’s the time. Sidney’s just escaped her clutches. You should go in now.”

Amy tenses, straightening her shoulders, and handing her drink to Iris. Her dress is subdued, mossy shade of avocado green; the sleeves are neatly cuffed, the bodice modest, and the chiffon skirt is lined with taffeta but does not come down past her knees. She dressed simply to be able to move quickly, and compared to some of the more outlandish costumes on display, her outfit is very subdued, almost dowdy, matronly. 

In contrast, June Carmody has clearly not had much difficulty in losing the baby weight; her violet satin dress is form fitting, and it fits her slender figure like a glove. The halter straps are hidden by her diaphanous matching cloak, but all the beadwork on her skirt catches at the lights as Amy approaches, schooling her expression into one of genuine apprehension. She has to sell this. June Carmody is not a buffoon like Charles Burke, and she certainly isn’t Tom. She might underestimate Amy, but she’s not going to just walk into a trap unless she has good cause to believe what’s being said to her. 

“Happy Solstice,” Carmody gives her a tired smile, toasting her with her cup. She does look tired, too, though maybe she just wishes she were home with her son tonight. 

The students will go home tomorrow, though, and she’ll have the entire holiday for herself and little Sean, Amy thinks, with a tinge of bitterness, unsure what she envies June for. Her young, innocent child who hasn’t learned to mistrust or resent her yet? Her doting husband who would never harm a hair on her head? Her competence in dueling? 

Amy doesn’t return the greeting beyond a slight nod, instead getting close enough to say. “Listen, June, I-,” she sighs. “I’ve been wanting to tell you all day, but what with classes finishing up, I hadn’t the time, and…”

June is immediately on alert. “What is it?” she asks, green eyes narrowed. It reminds Amy of the tapestry of Salazar. 

“I’ve had a letter from Eileen Prince; she was in my NEWT class- yours too, wasn’t she?”

June’s eyes widen; she looks genuinely taken aback for the first time. “Yes,” she says, “what did she say? Is she in trouble?”

Amy glances around, then lowers her voice even more. “I’d rather not say here- listen, would you rather read it for yourself? She- she seemed a bit panicked, and I’m not sure what she’s trying to tell me-,”

“Yes,” June says, cutting her off. “Yes, of course.” 

Her and Amy leave the hall through one of the semi-hidden side doors without a glance backwards. Amy doesn’t dare check to see if anyone noticed or not. She’s praying Norbrook is still locked in a droning chat with Dumbledore. 

Her office is on the first floor, so they haven’t a very far walk. Amy is used to patrolling the school at night, but tonight feels different. The wind tosses up snowflakes against the frosted windowpanes, and her and June’s shoes clack into a pleasing united rhythm.

Once inside her office, both are breathless, from the cold, drafty halls and the brisk walk in high heels. “I’ve locked it up in my desk, here,” Amy moves past her, turning on the lamps, and then stops to pour herself a glass of water from the pitcher on her desk. Careful to not hesitate, she gestures blindly to the pitcher and empty as she drinks, deeply deeply. “Help yourself.”

Without waiting to see if June does so, Amy moves around her desk to open a drawer with a small key from her pocket. 

She successfully opens it, and slips out the vial of Veritaserum as June reaches, after a moment’s hesitation, for the glass- and then drops it. 

“Shite,” June’s accent comes in strong when she curses. “Sorry,” she says, “slipped-,”

“Don’t worry about it,” Amy says, pulling out a pile of papers and letters from the drawer, while June awkwardly crouches down to try to clean up the mess of shattered glass. 

Amy was expecting that; she coated the glass in a Slipping Solution hours ago. A prank item, that, from the little shop in Hogsmeade. She drops two drops of Veritaserum into another glass, and slips the vial into the sash of her dress as June straightens back up. 

“So what does the letter say?” Carmody asks, slightly flustered, and pours herself another drink. This cup, of course, does not slip from her fingers as she raises it to her lips. 

Amy shuffles through the papers, and comes up with a letter. It’s from Ruby. She skims it as June sips and swallows, and says, “Some trouble with a boyfriend, I think? She mentioned she was living in Birmingham, but I’ve no idea how she got there, or what she’s been up-,”

Impatient, June takes the letter from her hand, then stops. Crumples in it in her fist. She sets down the glass on the desk, and says, steadily, “What is this?”

“That,” Amy would be lying if she said she took no pleasure from this, “is a letter from my friend Rubina Mishra. She works in New York, for one of their banks. Eileen never wrote me.”

June hasn’t gone for her wand yet, but she’s clearly considering it. Amy can almost hear her mind racing in her skull. “What did I just drink?” she asks, in a clipped voice.

“Water,” says Amy, “and a few drops of truth serum.”

June does go for her wand then. Amy feels her heart pound in her chest, but doesn’t react, staring placidly at June, whose cheeks are flushed with color. “You’re not going to curse me, June,” she says. “I’m sure you can think of plenty of reasons why that’s a bad idea.”

“You’re awfully cocky for someone who’s just confessed to drugging another professor.”

“Yeah,” says Amy, and lets a tendril of rage curl around her words like a clinging vine. “And you’ve always been awfully cocky for someone who’s been Tom Gaunt’s little spy in this school for years now.”

The color in June’s pale face disappears, except for the deep red of her lips. She presses them together, and says nothing.

“You can storm out of here,” Amy says. “I won’t stop you. But I’ll warn you, Veritaserum will last for the better part of an hour, so if I were you, I’d think twice. Apparently the Minister himself might drop in tonight”

June lowers her wand. “What do you want.” It’s not a question.

“Answers,” says Amy, and without preamble, “When did you become a Knight of Walpurgis, June?”

There is a visibly painful silence, and then June says in a rush, “July 31st, 1955.”

“Who recruited you?”

“I was recruited by-,” a hand flies up to her throat, as if to choke her own words off, but she gasps out, “I was recruited by Tom Gaunt and Wilhelmina Tuft.”

Amy blinks, hard. “Is Wilhelmina Tuft a Knight as well?” How is that possible? Surely there’d be some sort of-

“No.”

“Then why was she recruiting you with Tom?” 

“She didn’t,” June grinds out. 

Then it rushes over Amy like a wave. “They recruited you for two very different things,” she says, slowly, “Am I correct?”

June turns away from her. 

“What did Tuft want you to do?”

“To collect information on Gaunt.” 

“When did this start?”

“December 13th, 1954.”

Amy suddenly feels like she might need to sit down. “Did she recruit Nor- your husband, as well?”

“She approached him first.”

June’s speech is clearer now; she’s no longer trying to restrain it, no longer speaking out of mere magical compulsion but her own free will. She turns back to Amy, her eyes slitted and furious, face spotted with rage. 

“You,” she says, “have no idea what you’re doing. I have worked for years-,”

“For which side? Or just both?” Amy snaps.

“Yes,” says June. “Yes, Benson. While you fucked off to Gibraltar to raise your kid, some of us were here to see the way the wind was blowing, after the war. In ‘50, '51, '52- I was here. Arthur was here. Watching him rise, while you were playing doctor overseas, patting yourself on the back for a job well done, getting out from under his thumb. Some of us didn’t have the luxury of running off to hide.”

“Fuck you,” says Amy, on impulse.

June smiles sardonically. “Some of us,” she says, “have been at it for years. Just because you and Dumbledore and all his little pets have decided to waltz in at the last hour doesn’t give you a monopoly on justice.”

“So, justice,” says Amy in a hard voice. “That’s what you think of yourself as? Tell me, what justice have you delivered, June, running little errands for my-,”

“For your what?” June goads, then says. “No. I don’t. I don’t think of it as justice. But some things have to be done in the dark.”

“What have you done in the dark?” Amy presses, as the wind rattles at the windows. It’s building up to a proper snowstorm out there. 

“Well,” says June. “Murdered that bastard Mulciber, for one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. I don't have a ton to say about this chapter because a lot of the drama speaks for itself. The next chapter will pick up right where this one left off. 
> 
> 2\. Some people likely guessed the twist with June ahead of time, but I hope it was still suspenseful. 
> 
> 3\. Amy being able to pull one over on June at the end of this chapter is 100% dependent on the fact that June does genuinely care about Eileen and sees a lot of her younger self in her. 
> 
> 4\. I think Iris is more on the money about Tom's general fear of Hogwarts and his past than she knows.


	44. Amy XX - Mae XXII - Tom X

HOGWARTS, DECEMBER 1960

AMY

Amy has to sit down; her chair scrapes across the floor. She stares at the glass of water in front of her, then glances back at June, who has turned her back on her entirely, as if to demonstrate how little a threat she sees her as. 

“You killed Castor Mulciber,” Amy says. “Why?”

“Why?” June scoffs, without turning around.

“Well, apparently you surround yourself with murderous bastards all the time, including Tom himself, but none of them are dead yet,” Amy retorts. 

June glances at the office door, which is securely shut, then flicks her wand at it, casting a muffling charm. 

“I always update the spell,” Amy says, waspishly. “No one can eavesdrop on us.”

“Good,” June says, then turns back around. She seems to have calmed somewhat, and no longer has her wand trained on Amy, but is clearly still infuriated. In her shoes, Amy knows she would be too, but she can’t summon up much sympathy at the moment. June is telling the truth- she has no choice, but had she bothered to come out with of her own omission years or even months ago, then they could have-

“Mulciber is dead,” June says, “because he found out that Arthur was in communication with Tuft. We’re damn lucky he didn’t go straight to Tom with it. Instead he got coy, and decided to bargain for his silence.” She exhales, as if recollecting something unpleasant. “Arthur agreed on a meeting place, and we handled it.”

“So you set Virgil up.”

“Virgil set himself up,” June’s green eyes flash. “It was only a matter of time before he went down for those murders. Those girls- what was one more? His uncle deserved what he got. I don’t lose sleep over it.”

“I would,” Amy says, shortly. “You could have used him to help Tuft’s case, could have threatened him into switching sides-,”

“Don’t be naïve,” June rolls her eyes. “He was a lost cause. He was useless to us. What do you think is going to happen, they’re going to start hauling Knights into court one day to testify against Tom? Most of them with any sense will swear they’ve been Imperiused, hoodwinked. That they were threatened into whatever crimes can be attached to them. And that’s going to be difficult enough, proving they were even at those crimes-,”

“You’re a bloody member, shouldn’t you be able to verify-,”

“Do you think we go off on group missions together?” June snaps. “Tom Gaunt is not a blibbering idiot. Impulsive, yes, cocky, yes, but he’s not that stupid. He knows how to divide in conquer. He has orders? He gives them in private. He will rarely allow more than two Knights together at any one occasion, barring meetings. And even in meetings, he lets them do most of their own talking. He’s aware any one of them could turn on him, at any instant, and try to bring down the whole ship.”

“And what do these orders entail?” Amy demands. 

June looks like she might roll her eyes again, and scoff, but instead says, “That depends on what he sees as most pressing. Or what he feels he has to allow, to keep their support. Some of it is strictly white collar, if you catch my meaning. Insider trading and under the table deals and theft, more or less. Offshore accounts and tax fraud. That sort of thing. Someone has to pay for everything, and he’s got no great family fortune to fall back on himself, does he?”

“I thought that’s what the Rosier marriage was for,” Amy says in a low, disgusted voice. 

“The Rosier marriage was because he knew he needed to commit,” June says. “Marry one of their daughters or sisters, seal the deal. Really roll around in the same bed as them, so to speak-,” she sounds like she might laugh, for a moment, seeing the look on Amy’s face. “And yes, the dowry wouldn’t hurt, either, though he would have been better off with an heiress. Maybe he’s banking on it. Lyle Rosier’s only got girls. If Tom has a son with Lydia, the estate will be in his pocket.”

“For her sake, I hope that doesn’t happen,” Amy says.

“Well, that makes two of us, doesn’t it?” June is silent for a moment, then says. “But it’s not all about the money. Some of it is- well. I’ve seen things I don’t think you’d like to hear about.”

“While you were having a little lark dueling around the world, I was helping clean up Grindelwald’s mess in France,” Amy says. “I’ve seen more than you think.”

“Then you know,” June offers a grim smile. “You know the sort of things they do. No bodies… well, how can you report crimes without evidence of one? Check muggle newspapers, and you’ll find some of them. Not in the Prophet. But Castor Mulciber- well, he was there for the Sadlers, and that was nasty work. So did I regret it, killing him?” She swallows. “Not at all.”

“The Sadlers…” Amy wracks her brain, but can’t recall anything that might call them to mind. “Who are they? Not purebloods-,”

“No, muggleborns. Quite wealthy. It was before you came back,” June says. “Summer of ‘56, I think it was? To make a long story short, Bernard Sadler gets on the wrong side of a few purist scions while trying to get elected into the Wizengamot. They get it into their heads that the Wizengamot needs to remain untainted- no mudbloods. And that he’s a bit too big for his britches, Sadler, because he’s unapologetic about it.”

“They try the usual intimidation, threats, even bribes. Nothing works. So Castor Mulciber rounds up young Virgil, his sons, and Fitz and Georgie Avery, and they pay them a visit at their summer house. It doesn’t end well. Sadler winds up dead in a lake, his wife is completely broken and committed to St Mungo’s, and the kids are missing. They still never found their bodies.”

Amy finds herself rigid in her seat, as if paralyzed. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want you to understand what you’re sticking your grubby fingers in,” June says. “And I want you to understand that as much as you see them as blustering oafs and cowardly old men, they’re not. Not in the dark, not with a mask.”

Amy has never heard anything about masks, but now she starts to wonder. “Why did Tuft choose you and Arthur?” she asks, instead. “I- what was her plan?”

“She saw the writing on the wall,” June shrugs. “Arthur worked in the same office as Tom; she knew they were on courteous terms. She thought he had a decent shot of getting some insight, even if he was never made a Knight. Tom surprised all of us when he offered to induct Arthur. Then, come to find out, at least a quarter of them are halfbloods, just hiding it as best they can.”

Amy sniffs in disgust.

“Yeah,” says June. “Well. She wanted me for my dueling. What else? Tom has Applewhite- has always had Applewhite, since he came back from fighting the Nazis and decided muggles couldn’t be left to look after themselves anymore.”

“He doesn’t see any similarities?” Amy asks incredulously.

“Sure he does,” June shrugs. “He doesn’t care, so long as they’re not hurting his wife, his kids. He thinks we’d all be better off for it, wizards in charge, a new order.”

“And you,” Amy says, “so- that was all just a front? Your… your feelings towards muggles?”

June is silent, then says. “No. But not like this. Never like this.” Her voice hardens again. “And not with the likes of Tom Gaunt at the head of it. Mark me, Benson. One day there’ll be more magic curtain,” she waves a hand angrily. “No more glamors. They will see us for what we are, and we’ll see them as they always have been. And it won’t be a pretty meeting. But not now. Not like this.”

Amy digs her nails into her skirt. “What orders has Tom given you here? Specifically?”

“Spy,” says June. “But I thought you already knew that?” Her voice takes on a mocking lilt.

“Regarding us,” Amy snaps. “Your colleagues. Dumbledore. My-,”

“Oh, right. Well, he wants Dumbledore dismissed, preferably not just sacked but hauled off to Azkaban on charges of treason. He wants Dippet replaced too, with someone he can trust, like Tony Nott, as Headmaster. He wants less Defence Against, and more The Study of the Dark Arts. He wants names and locations of every teacher in this school, and what they talk about, and who they talk to, and if they know anything he doesn’t.”

June pauses, as if for breath, then says, coldly, “And lately, you see, he’s been wanting me to keep a particular eye on you.”

Amy tenses even more, if that’s possible. “And what have you told him?”

“He has access to my memories,” June says. “I rarely tell him anything.” Seeing Amy’s horrified look, she adds, “But I know enough occlumency to throw him off. I was already studying it when I was dueling professionally... thought it'd give me an edge in competitions. Tuft tutored me in the rest.”

“He doesn’t know you’re hiding things from him?”

June shrugs. “He might suspect. But I’m too valuable as his eyes and ears in this castle. He gives me more leeway than he might otherwise. And Arthur keeps him appeased; he’s good at that. Moderating.”

Amy doesn’t know what to say after that. Should she just come out and tell June? Full disclosure. No, that’s absurd. June is being truthful, but she’s also being truthful about just how untrustworthy and devious she can be. 

“If you’re wondering whether I know whatever history you have with him,” June says, shortly. “I don’t. And if you’re wondering if I’m about to breathlessly inquire as to who fathered Mae, I’ll tell you right now, I really couldn’t care less.” 

Amy keeps her mouth shut. She is not the one dosed with truth serum right now.

June looks she might sneer, then just shakes her head. “You have something else he wants. Or wanted. He almost had me break into your office once to look for it, but he lost his nerve. I hope you still have it, for your sake.”

“He’s not going to kill me,” Amy says. 

“No,” June agrees. “I don’t think he would. Bit of advice, though? I’ve been in some sticky fucking situations, around some very dangerous people, Benson. It’s not the ones who want to kill you flat out, who you need to watch out for. It’s the ones who want to play games. And he- your old school chum, your old boyfriend, whatever he is to you- I think he started counting one, two, three, a while ago. You should run and hide now, before it’s too late.”

“You have no right to tell me how to live my life,” Amy snaps. “Ten minutes ago you were sneering at me about that very thing, running and hiding-,”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t smart of you,” June says. “I think it was the brightest thing you’ve ever done. Why in God’s name would you come back here? You should have taken that girl and gone a world away.”

“I couldn’t run forever.”

“Not forever,” she says. “Just until he’s been put in the ground.” June arches a plucked eyebrow. “Do you think Dumbledore is going to do that? Noble Albus? He didn’t so much as touch a hair on Grindelwald’s head, and you think he’s going to handle Tom?”

“The right way-,”

“The right way,” June snaps. “Do you think Tom Gaunt- Tom Riddle- what, you think he’s going to rot in prison? Quietly resign? Leave the country with his wife?” 

No, Amy thinks. I knew the answer a long time ago, when I was just a girl. I still know it now. 

June must see it in her eyes; she just nods. “Whatever I stand up in say in court about him- whatever any of us say,” she says. “That happens after he's gone. Not before.”

MAE

After forty minutes, Mae’s forced to conclude that most of her peers can’t dance. Not only can they not dance, they seem incapable of actually interacting to a physical degree that would permit dancing. The boys and girls are stand in separate little cliquish clumps, only mingling when goaded into it by their respective friends. The oldest students, the sixth and seventh years, are a little better, but most people still don’t seem keen on dancing unless they came with a date, and even then, they never want to change partners. 

“This is the pits,” she confides in Malcolm, who is breathlessly drinking fruit punch. He has been dancing, actually, so she can’t lump him in with all the rest- but only with Maureen. Everyone expected them to break up, what with her being shipped off to live with the Selwyns, but if anything, despite not being able to see each other or even write all summer, it seems to have convinced Malcom and Maureen that they’re a modern day Romeo and Juliet, the destined lovers forced apart by a cruel society. 

Which is just a way of saying that they’ve been all over each other, hence Malcolm’s exhaustion and beleaguered stare as he listens to Mae complain. 

“What did you expect?” he finally cuts in. “Most people here aren’t muggleborn. They’re not going to know muggle dances, even the halfbloods. Besides, you’re too intimidating.”

Mae scoffs aloud, though she internally preens at the remark. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

“I mean-,” he gestures vaguely at her as he slouches against a wall; he’s as gangly as ever, and his too-short robes and loosened tie are not helping matters. “Blokes are scared to ask you to dance, because you might bite their head off.”

Mae scowls. “I am not a bad dancer!” She’s certain it’s not just cockiness; she’s seen herself in the mirror plenty of times, and Mum always said she had good rhythm, unlike most clumsy teenagers. 

“You’re not,” says Malcolm, “you just dance like a bloody maniac, alright? Christ. How are you not sweating?”

Mae shrugs; she isn’t wearing formal robes over her dress, which is red and green plaid taffeta that comes down a little past her knobby knees. She’d rather it be shorter, but Mum vetoed that, and warned they’d send her right back up to bed if she was caught pinning her skirt up. She crosses her bare arms over her belted torso; the sleeves are short, and the skirt is pleated but quite thin, so she’s not wearing nearly as much heavy material as the others present. 

But she is a little breathless; she takes a cup from the table and ladles punch into it as she scans the room. She’s been looking for Agneza all night but hasn’t caught sight of her yet, though this is a big hall filled with hundreds of people, so it’s not that surprising. Mae isn’t even sure what she means to do if she should run into Agneza, she’d just- she’d just like to see her, is all. 

She spots Marian a ways away, standing in front of one of the tinseled Christmas trees, batting away nosy pixies as she talks to Ambrose, who has probably been trying to work up the nerve to ask her to dance all night. Sometimes Mae would tease him about his very obvious crush on her, when- well, when they still talked about things. Her gut tightens, but she ignores it. It’s not her fault they decided to ambush her like that, and while she does feel badly about going off on Ambrose, what did he expect? He’s a Bulstrode, a pureblood Slytherin, he of all people should understand what it feels like to be defensive about your family. 

And Marian… well, it’s not like when Mae was fighting all the time with Christine. Marian is more mature; she doesn’t pointedly ignore Mae, or pout, or glare, she just keeps things… civil, and doesn’t say a word more than she has to. Mae misses sitting next to her in Transfiguration, and passing her funny notes in History of Magic to try to make her break her composure and chuckle, though. But-

“Hi!” Christine has bounded over to them, uncharacteristically chipper. She started off the night in a much different mood, because her arsehole brother and his stupid friends were making fun of her silly dress; Christine’s pale pink dress robes perfectly match her pink and grey plaid sailor dress, complete with little wool bobbles along the jaunty collar and sleeves. It’d be cutesy on a ten year old little girl. On a fourteen year old, it’s snicker-worthy. 

Still, Mae wasn’t about to stand for that, so she discreetly hexed Mick while they were coming down the stairs to enter the hall, and it was worth it to see Christine’s teary flush transform into almost gleeful amusement. She’s noticed it more this year, but when Christine forgets to act all snotty and prim, and just… lets herself go, she’s actually really fun to be around. Mae sees it in Dueling Club the most; they spar every week, her and Christine, and it’s ceased to be torturous and is now more like… well, a familiar dance routine. 

Besides that, though it’s very obvious Mae and Marian have had some sort of spat, Christine’s held her tongue for once, and hasn’t questioned Mae about it, so Mae is more inclined to agree when Christine asks her to dance to this next song. There’s probably more girls dancing together right now than girls with boys, anyways- somehow, that’s less embarrassing for people. 

“Where’s Valerie?” Mae asks her, as they gamely foxtrot. 

“Faked sick off the shrimp cocktail,” Christine says, looking less disapproving than Mae would have expected. “Professor Witherspoon brought her back up to the common room and let her to go to bed. The Notts aren’t happy, though, look-,” she jerks her head over Mae’s shoulder, and when they pivot, Mae peers past Christine to regard Mr. and Mrs Nott, who are talking to the headmaster. 

Mr. Nott doesn’t look that annoyed, just a bit bored in that old man way where they lose track of the conversation halfway through it, but his wife, who looks at least ten years younger, seems peeved, her lips almost pursed. 

“She looks like the Minister’s wife,” Mae blurts out; the resemblance is uncanny, though her hair is a little darker and she is obviously much older. 

“Well, that’s her aunt, right?”

They turn again, skirting around a far more clumsily dancing couple. 

“The Minister might show up, everyone is saying,” Christine informs her breathlessly, as they spin again. 

Mae stiffens but manages to keep her expression from flickering to one of dismay or fear, to her relief. “I bet he has better things to do than show up at some stupid school dance.”

“Stupid, is it?” Christine challenges. “You’ve been cutting up a rug out here all night!”

Mae starts to rolls her eyes, then laughs a little.

“Got you,” Christine smirks slightly; then the song is ending. 

“Thanks,” says Mae, as they let go of each other. “Happy Solstice, Christine.”

“Happy Yule!” Christine smiles brightly, then goes over to talk to Marian, leaving Mae for the moment alone. 

She starts towards the high table at the end of the hall to see where her mum is, then changes her mind and turns back around when she catches sight of a familiar head of platinum blonde hair. Agneza is in a huddle with a few of her friends; she’s never had many, exactly, as far as Mae can tell, but they’re all along the same lines; rebellious and outspoken, Ravenclaws and Gryffindors, girls who curse like boys and cut their hair shaggy or put grease in it, or get in trouble for trying to wear trousers to class.

Mae suddenly feels young and childish in her stupid red-and-green plaid dress; is it really that different from Christine’s, after all- especially when she catches sight of Agneza, who all but glows in her strapless gold-spangled cocktail dress. 

It either cost a fortune or is a very convincing knockoff of a designer brand, though honestly, Agneza could make a ton of money modeling, and not just because she’s an eighth Veela. She has a striking sort of beauty, all hard edges and piercing eyes, and a slender, swan-like neck, a perfect jawline and delicate nose, unlike Mae’s, which is snubbed, almost pug-like, she sometimes critically thinks. 

Agneza is clearly in the middle of some dispute with her friends; Mae hangs back, knowing she should just go away- she’s not stupid enough to try to interject herself into the middle of this, and these girls would never give her time of the day, they’re all sixth and seventh years, practically adults. But then Agneza has broken off from the rest of them, and without so much as a backward glance, darted out one of the narrow side exits before one of the patrolling professors has time to notice. 

Her friends stay where they are, muttering to each other and clearly trying to cover for her escape route. 

Mae walks past them, skirts around one of the tables full of refreshments, and waits until Professor Morgenstern, the closest teacher, is distracted by trying to break up a snogging couple under some mistletoe, who are practically about to start humping each other through their clothes like stray dogs, Mae thinks. Once his back is turned, she darts behind yet another evergreen tree, and is out of the hall, breaking into the much draftier foyer. 

She has no idea where Agneza’s gone, and is about to make for the nearest lavatory to see if she went in to powder her nose, then smells something odd, and follows it into the tapestry hall, which also leads off the grand antechamber. Agneza’s propped open two windows; snowflakes flurry into the darkened hall as she puffs on a cigarette, sitting slouched on a low stone bench. 

Mae stands there, just watching her, then steels herself and seizes the moment, trying to look nonchalant and surprised to see Agneza, as if she hadn’t just followed her out. 

“Hey,” Agneza says, without really looking up. She takes an experienced drag; Mae never knew she smoked. Mum’s banned her from it, but then again, Mum’s banned her from loads of things, most of which she’s still done or going to do, at some point. 

“Have any to spare?” she asks, trying to sound as if she’s done this a million times before. 

Agneza shrugs limply, then does look up, and waves her over, handing her one. She doesn’t offer a lighter, so Mae ignites it with an Incendio from her wand, relieved when it catches on the first spark of flame. And that she didn’t set her hair on fire. 

She sits down next to Agneza, taking a long pull- and then starts to choke and hack. She coughs so hard and raggedly that she almost drops the cigarette, and Agneza looks at her in concern, then starts to laugh. 

Mae is bright red in the face by the time she’s done coughing; she’s glad it’s dark, save for the moonlight. 

“Just… I have a cough, anyways, so-,”

“Yeah,” says Agneza, unconvinced. Then she sighs. “That did cheer me up, though, Benson.”

Mae variates between her pride, which is considerable, and her desire to keep talking to Agneza, which is also considerable. She’s still making up her mind when Agneza confesses, “It’s so stupid. I shouldn’t even be upset. It’s not Fred’s fault. He’s- well, you saw in the paper today, I guess. He had to go home straight away, to be with his family.”

Mae hadn’t even been thinking of that, actually, because she’s tried very hard to not even think of Fred Avery these past few weeks, to not think of what it might be like to be in his shoes, to hold Agneza’s soft, long-fingered hand, or to sit next to her in class, shoulder to shoulder, or to kiss her; Mae wonders what cigarettes taste like, and if the bubble gum Agneza often chews which improve that at all. 

“I’m sorry,” she says instead, though she is only sorry Agneza is upset, but she actually isn’t that sorry about that, either, because that’s why she’s out here right now, smoking a cigarette with her. 

“Don’t be,” says Agneza. “He’s just a boy. I shouldn’t get so worked up over boys, Mama’s always telling me.”

“My mum too,” Mae says, then wants to kick herself. Why are they talking about boys right now? That’s the last thing she wants to talk about. 

“It must be horrible,” Agneza says. “Having your mum be a professor. Her knowing everything. When you get in trouble, your marks-,” she shudders. “Ugh. You have my condolences.”

“Thanks,” Mae says dryly, unable to keep the sarcasm from her now hoarse voice. 

Agneza chuckles again, and turns to her as if to properly apologize, a sympathetic smile playing on her glossy lips. 

Mae kisses her before she can talk herself out of it. 

For an instant Agneza instinctively pulls back in surprise, then yields to it for a moment, her mouth opening up, and then it’s over. Mae draws back, biting her lip. Agneza stares at her, not incensed or horrified but just looking very surprised, then turns away. 

“Sorry,” Mae says, though it’s barely above a whisper. 

“Don’t be,” Agneza sounds like she’s forcibly trying to be casual about this. “I- woah.” She says nothing else for a moment, her tone broken from its usual cool and composed crispness to something younger and more uncertain. “I don’t go like that, though,” she says. “You know. I’m not a lesbian just because I cut my hair short and wear a boy’s blazer sometimes.”

Mae wants to crawl under the bench and die there. “I… I didn’t think you were,” she says. She doesn’t know what else to say. “I just-,”

“It’s fine,” Agneza tells her. “Loads of people want to kiss me. It doesn’t mean you’re one, either. Don’t worry about it.”

Mae hadn’t been worried, but now thinks maybe she should have been. She’d never- well, she hadn’t thought about it like that at all. She knows what a lesbian is, obviously, she’s not a little child, she just… that’d all seemed so far off and remote, like a… a role in a film, not… anything that could be applicable to real life. Now her stomach does a series of flips, and she digs her nails into her skirt.

“I just thought it’d be fun to see,” she forces herself to say, instead. “You know, what it’s- what it’s like, to kiss a girl. Instead- instead of boys.”

“Yeah,” Agneza smiles briefly back at her, then pecks Mae freely on the cheek. “You’re cute. Don’t worry about that. Plenty of people will want to kiss you, when you’re my age.”

When you’re my age. As if Mae were the gap-toothed little girl following her around, begging for a kiss. She can feel herself deflating like a popped balloon. She’d almost have rathered Agneza have had a fit and insulted her and told her she was disgusting, or a freak. 

Her eyes sting, but she forces herself to take another puff from the cigarette. This time she doesn’t cough or sputter, and Agneza shoots her an approving look, as the wind gusts at their hair, through the open window. 

TOM

He feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up as the carriage rumbles past the castle gates. It’s slow going due to the snow, though fortunately it isn’t accumulating much on the ground, and thestrals are hardier than horses or ponies would be. Tom can still recall the first time he saw one, the night he arrived back at Hogwarts for his seventh year. It feels odd he’d never seen anyone dead before the age of seventeen. There were two world wars going on at the time. 

He dreamed about them a few months ago, the Riddles. Not them, specifically, but that house. The musty, almost humid silence that enveloped it like a damp sheet when he was finished. He’d stood there in the parlor for what seemed like hours, like a statue, rigid and unmoving, his wand still in his hand. 

There was no need to rush out in a panic; he’d planned it well. 

Their maid and cook both lived in the village, not in the house, and had gone home for the evening. The groundskeeper was off in his own shabby little cottage, and with the curtains closed there was no chance of him having seen a flash of light from outside. He’d made certain ahead of time that they wouldn’t be having guests or expecting any visitors after dinner that night, and the telephone in the hall was untouched. 

The old man had not even made it out of his armchair; now he simply slumped over it in, as if he’d just innocently nodded off to sleep, his book still open on his lap, his pipe leaking tobacco onto the plush carpet. The old woman had jumped to her feet in horror, but the spell had caught her square in the chest and she’d simply crumpled back down onto the velvet sofa, her elegant clothes wrinkled, one slipper half-off her foot. Tom Riddle, though, had been too frightened or shocked to move, had simply stood there, glass in hand, the look of derision on his lined and swollen face halfway to horror. 

When he’d dropped, the glass should have shattered, and indeed the whiskey had gone spilling down his trousers, but Tom had caught it before it could break, and levitated it back onto the table. His mother, he distinctly remembers overhearing Mrs Cole telling Miss Patrick, had not died of blood loss or of a seizure or an infection from the childbed. Her heart had simply weakened and stopped within a few hours of his birth, while he was nursing at her chest. 

“As if he sucked the very life from her,” she’d said. 

For a little while Tom had considered that, as a small boy, had wondered if it was his fault, if his first action on this earth had been to kill his own mother, somehow consume her from the inside out, leaving just a withered husk behind, like some sort of exotic parasite. Now he knows she simply gave up. She let herself slip away. There was no fight left in her, if there had ever been any, after his father abandoned them. 

“She tricked me,” Tom Riddle had told him. “She- she bewitched me, she forced me- I would never have willingly gone with her. Her family- your family! You say you’re my son. You have her eyes. Dark and beady. Like beetles. And his look, her mad old father, and that deranged brother- it’s in the blood. Whatever it is, whatever- what do you want from me? Go find them. They’re more your family than I ever will be.”

Tom had gone to find them, in fact. Yes, he had. He did not meet a much happier receival there, to be sure, but at that point he no longer cared. 

Tom Riddle was wrong about his son. He does have a family. It’s not the one he would have chosen, not the one he envisioned, but he has one all the same. And Amy is nothing like his mother. He knows that now. Yes, she abandoned him, but she would never have abandoned their child. That means something. It must. 

He will never forgive her, but if he’d come to find that she had left Mae at some orphanage, motherless- he would have strangled the life from her with his bare hands, forget magic. He would have wrung her neck. And if she’d died in childbirth, just to spite him, if she’d let herself go out like some pathetic little martyr, he would have found a way to bring her back, just so he could kill her again. 

There are rumors, there always have been, of a stone, that could not just commune with the dead, but bring them back, not as ghosts, not as Inferi, but as something between incorporeal and corporeal, as shades upon this coil. He’s never concerned himself much with it, but sometimes he does wonder, as he does now, as the carriage winds its way through the wind and sleeting snow up to the castle on the hill, what he would say to her, to Merope, if he could see her. 

He knows what she looks like; the Gaunts kept no photographs, too muggle for them, but she must have paid or wheedled someone into taking one of her, when she was a teenager. Perhaps because there were no mirrors, in that shack. They’d all been shattered. Maybe she had no idea what she looked like, and desperately convinced herself she was a true diamond in the rough, a beauty weighed down by grime and muck, just waiting for the handsome prince to whisk her away. 

She was no beauty. He knew that from the instant he looked at the tiny headshot he found, buried at the bottom of a rotting wooden drawer. She was smiling nervously for the camera, revealing a flash of crooked teeth, but black and white could not disguise her homeliness; her forehead was too wide, her brows too thick and heavy, her eyes protruding. Her nose was small, and her ears, but her lips were no delicate Cupid’s bow, but pinched and fishy, he thought, and her neck was too skinny. Her dark hair was combed for the photo but hung lank and straight and slightly greasy, it seemed, tucked behind her ears, held together by a fraying ribbon. 

He was disgusted, looking at her, and knew then the scorn and contempt his father must have had for her. For years Tom had convinced himself that his father had either been threatened and cajoled into abandoning them by his wealthy muggle parents, or was simply a coward who felt emasculated by his wife’s magical powers. Now he knows the truth; he never loved her at all. She bewitched him; Amortentia seems likely, Tom doubts she had the willpower or grit to Imperius someone for nearly two years. 

Her mistake was weaning him off the potion, obviously. He woke up one day and saw her puttering about, grotesquely swollen with pregnancy, in some dingey little flat paid for by money he’d stolen from his parents, and that was that. He must have run out the door, or given her a few blows first, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, screaming, across the floor, thrown her into the kitchen table, upsetting the breakfast she’d laid out for them, and left her there, wailing and kicking her feet, like a tantruming toddler, on the kitchen floor, as he made his escape. 

Tom isn’t sure who he loathes more, sometimes. Him or her. They may never have been in ‘genuine’ love, but they had that much in common, their ability to awake such a fury in their own son. 

“We’re here,” Lydia says in a tone just shy of baleful, as the carriage sways to a stop. 

Tom looks over at her; she drops her gaze innocently, and then looks back up with a slight smile, as if to make up for her sourness. She’s been very out of sorts today; he’d almost think she were pregnant, but he knows she’s just had her monthly a few days ago. It’s not as if he’s actively keeping track, but she consumes copious amounts of sweets when it’s that time, lurking for hours in the kitchen with that house elf she sometimes sneaks into their house. 

Still, if almost three years of marriage have taught him anything, it’s when to pick his battles. The way to handle Lydia is not to dominate or intimidate her to the point where she is a weepy mess. It doesn’t work on her; she makes a big show of fear or obedience, and then glares daggers and hisses venom behind your back. You have to have a softer touch with her; let her think she’s won, or at least that she’s forgiven. Tom reckons he has enough people holding grudges with his name on them, without adding his wife to the list. 

Besides, he knows she isn’t going to do anything rash tonight. She’s not stupid. They may not have any children, but divorce is just no done in these circles, and they are on the same ship now. Even when filled with a spiteful desire to embarrass or hurt him, she wouldn’t dare do anything that might besmirch her own good name, or cast aspersions on their marriage. 

If she has the sense God gave a goose, she will realize that there is a time to throw a fit and stamp her little foot, and a time to plaster on a smile and keep her mouth shut, as she has been doing for years, long before he ever came into the picture. Honestly, he is almost offended the way she sometimes seems to blame him for her family’s ill treatment of her. 

She could have ended up with the likes of Alexander Nott or Virgil Mulciber, men who wouldn’t have contented themselves with some stern words or warning looks when their wife was so insolent towards them. 

He can understand her resentment, her anger, towards her parents, her aunt, her brother- all of them. But does she thinks it makes her so special? Plenty of people loathe their families. Plenty of pureblood witches simmer with rage towards their families. And he has never insisted, never lashed out at her for not giving him a child yet. He hasn’t even mentioned it in passing. 

Truthfully, before he- well, when they were first engaged, he had thought, a few times, considered, what a child of theirs might look like, and the thought hadn’t disturbed or unnerved him. Far from it. But now- well, now when he thinks of that child, another, irritatingly familiar face pops into his head, one who is not so much a baby or toddler at all, but a gawky teenage girl with bright blue eyes and a snubbed nose. 

“You look beautiful tonight,” he tells Lydia, as he opens the carriage door, and blithely hands her down from it a moment later, offering her his arm as if nothing were the matter in the least. 

He shivers, though, when they step through the doors into the antechamber has not seen in over a decade, and not from the cold gust of wind at their backs as the massive wooden doors slam shut behind them, reverberating through the stone walls. 

There’s the usual receiving line; this one is not of Ministry workers or healers at St. Mungo’s or reporters at a charity event, but professors, some of whom are very familiar to him. Dippet looks as though he’d seen a ghost, though Tom can’t imagine why; they’ve spoken in recent years, at many events outside of the school. 

Dumbledore restrains himself, but only tries the grandfatherly smile on Lydia, who titters in response, flushed from the cold. Witherspoon looks at him in open disapproval, as if he were a disobedient nephew, Morgenstern glares, Romilly’s greeting is snide. Hobbes draws back from him as if he were a scorpion poised to strike, Beery smiles banally, Kettleburn all but glowers with full Scottish ferocity. Finch is coolly polite, as if anyone cares about what the Astronomy professor thinks, and Penvenen all but bares her well-maintained teeth. Mistral isn’t there; down with a head cold, and Binns is floating up near the ceiling, muttering to himself. 

June shakes his hand with a firm grip, inclining her head to him, and Amy-

“Professor,” Tom says politely, no different from his greeting to any of the others.

Lydia doesn’t stiffen or flinch; rather she overflows with manufactured warmth. 

“Professor Benson! Happy Solstice! Such a shame about the gala being canceled, of course, I know my uncle was crushed-,”

“Such a shame,” Amy agrees, shaking her head, and shakes Tom’s hand. She’s always shaken hands like a man, he’s felt, grip too firm, almost challenging, and tonight is no different. 

“Happy Solstice, Minister,” she says. 

He is tempted to squeeze back but keeps himself in check. 

We’ll see, is all he thinks. We’ll see where this show of bravado takes you, in another six months. You’ll be begging. Begging me for a word, a gesture, anything. Smile away, you self-serving bitch. 

He doesn’t feel very remorseful of the venom in his thoughts; he can see the same sentiment flickering behind those glassy blue eyes. Arrogant bastard, or some version of that. She was never the most creative with her insults. 

Inside, there is the usual amount of photo ops, students shyly approaching to ask for an autograph, a picture, or just to tell him how much they or their parents admire him (a few come up to tell him their parents despise him, but that they ‘think he’s alright’). Some glare from a distance, wander closer and closer until Lydia pounces, and then end up speaking to him anyways, their sullen silence gradually transforming into begrudging politeness, even awe. 

Tom knows the shock and celebrity of his election has largely worn off, three years down the line. But in person, he can still fall back on the same trite things that all people love; youth, good looks, charm. He’s young enough to be some of their teachers’ son, he doesn’t look old and weathered or like a stout penguin in a suit, like the images of politicians in their heads. His dress robes are brand new and elegantly embroidered, he speaks quietly but warmly to all of them, and he smiles a level amount, not frequent enough to seem insincere or sparing enough to seem snobbish. 

They allow some of the first years to open their presents, and a few are escorted over to thank him and the Notts, shyly avoiding eye contact or clutching their unwrapped gifts to their chests.

Tom does feel an odd sort of kinship, for a moment; sometimes wealthy donors would arrive Wool’s around Christmas time. But the gifts they donated were far lower quality than these; cheap mass-produced dolls or toy soldiers, thing you could find in the bargain bin of any shop on any corner. 

He always asked for books; he never got any. He wrote dutifully to Father Christmas from the ages of four to six, until he realized he was never going to get a response, because it was just another grown-up lie. 

Amy never wrote him at all, he remembers now; she’d never received any Christmas gifts at all, when she came to Wool’s, and looked baffled when Miss Patrick read them the story of the Nativity. 

He easily makes out Mae in the crowd, after that; she’s standing in between a blonde girl and a skinny dark-haired boy who looks vaguely familiar, her arms folded across her narrow chest, a scowl on her pale face. When he looks for her again, she’s vanished. 

The band the Notts hired has stopped playing whatever teeny bop hits are popular with young witches and wizards now, and have fallen back on more traditional orchestral music. He dances with Lydia, of course, making sure the photographer from the Prophet gets both of their best angles, and spins her to show off her elegant white-and-silver dress, with it’s red ribboned sash. In the candlelight, it sheens and glimmers like the metallic scales of a snake or fish. 

Then she dances with her uncle, and he with her aunt, who is a fouler mood than usual this evening, still brooding over whatever squabble she and Lydia had earlier today, or the fact that the Rosiers still don’t have a male heir for unfortunate Lyle, the miserable bastard. 

Some of the professors refuse to participate, but a few gamely take to the floor, Dumbledore among them; he’s really giving Witherspoon a work-over, old codger that he is. 

Lydia asks the Astronomy professor, Finch, to dance, likely to annoy him; Finch is the youngest male teacher, though still pushing forty. He invites Penvenen, but she demurs on account of a twisted ankle, and to be fair she has removed her left shoe. 

He looks around; Lucinda Amell is right there, and it would be worth it to ask her just to see the look on Therese Nott’s face; they seem to have some old rivalry, as far as he can tell. Amy is standing there as well, watching Lydia and Finch, and he is not honestly considering asking her, but draws closer all the same, just to see her drop the stoic act and keep her distance. Just to see the fear in across her face, he’ll admit. He’ll know then if Mae is still around. She’s never quite so brave when her daughter is a witness. 

But she doesn’t skirt away; she sees him coming, plasters on a smile, and approaches, or at least, doesn’t avoid him, though she easily could disappear into the crowd.

He makes up his mind with a jolt of annoyance and anticipation. 

“My wife’s left me in a terrible bind,” he says to her, not bothering to lower his voice; he isn’t being perverse, or incriminating. “She’s dancing with your colleague Finch, and she knows she’ll outdo me on that floor, any night. Look at her. Like she were floating.”

Lydia does dance beautifully; that’s no exaggeration. 

“She looks lovely, Minister,” Amy says, not simpering, but not sniping, either. “Just wonderful. You’re a lucky man.”

“I am,” he says. “Well, what do you say, Professor? Do me the honor?”

She could demur, as Penvenen did; she knows he wouldn’t dare press it, not like this. She could refuse, play it off as a joke, suggest one of her colleagues; Dorothy Hobbes and Vivian Rutherford are both close by. 

“How can I refuse?” Amy says instead, with the barest sardonic edge, and puts her hand in his. 

He’s almost shocked at her nerve, but it’s too late now. 

They’re just playing a simple waltz; you don’t have to think to waltz, that’s the entire point of the dance. Still, he finds himself thinking, even with her a very professional distance from him, and his hand at her mid back, not the small of it. He can smell her shampoo, mingling with her perfume, and he can see the sweat beading on the side of her neck from the heat of the hall. 

Her dress is an unremarkable plain green number, but it shimmers in the light, and she dances, not badly, but purposefully, bringing her heels down a little harder than necessary with every step, until every once in a while she forgets, and loses herself to the music, before snapping herself out of any sort of unity with him. 

“Who would have guessed,” he says. “The Potions professor was hiding a pair of dancing shoes all this time. You’re not half-bad.”

“You’re flattering me,” she says, coolly. “”I haven’t danced in years.”

“No?” They move past another couple. “I can’t see why not. You’re something of a natural. With the right partner, I’m sure you’d have a grand time.”

“Well,” she says, “A boy took me to a ball when I was a girl, but he never bothered to ask me to dance. I think I lost my taste for it then.”

He still remembers what she wore that night, and how it had taken him by surprise, the power of his wanting her. He’d been attracted to her before that, obviously, but it had been natural, easy- there was nothing conscious about it, it was just a consequence of her presence, the things it did to him. 

That night, he’d watched her dance with Alphard Black and had felt something more solid settle down in the pit of his stomach, like a hard stone. It had seized his throat, too, until he had to focus his breath. He’d wanted her then, badly, as much as he’d ever wanted anything, and it hard hurt, the ache had horrified him. 

“He sounds like a little fool,” he says. “Who didn’t know how good he had it.” 

“Truth be told, he was,” she smiles, but her eyes are hard. 

“That’s the thing about boys,” he says. “They change with the weather. I think we give young girls a bad name. It’s boys you have to watch out for. They never know what they want until they’ve lost it.” 

Finch and Lydia brush past them, forcing her to move slightly close to him. If he closed the gap, they would be chest to chest, or close enough, given the difference in height. Even in heels, she is still a head or more shorter than him. He imagines he can feel the pounding of her heart, even from here. Her hand is slick in his, the pulse in her wrist jumping. He presses a thumb down on it, for a moment, just to see her eyes dilate. With fear or fury, he’s not sure, and doesn’t care. 

“The only good thing about them,” he says, “is that they grow into men.”

Her smile widens, almost painfully. “More’s the pity,” she says. “That boy who asked me out, I quite liked him, even after he stood me up like that. Silly of me, I know, but I was just a little girl. The man, though… well, if I ever saw him again, I think I’d just walk right out of the room the moment I laid eyes on him.”

He lets out an exhale, faux-impressed. “Good thing he’s not here to face your wrath, Professor. I’d pity him.”

“You should.” 

The song ends, and if he is slow to release her, she is quick to wrench away from him, smiling politely all the while, before she turns her back and walks away, vanishing into the crowd in a blur of green.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. In case June's explanation was confusing: she and Arthur conspired together to murder Castor Mulciber because he discovered that Arthur was spying for Wilhelmina Tuft, and threatened to inform on them to Tom. Luckily for them, he was cocky enough to be tricked into meeting about it in private, which June took as an opportunity to kill him. 
> 
> 2\. Much like in canon, where Lucius Malfoy and others evaded jail time or any kind of punishment for their actions as Death Eaters, June predicts that a lot of current Knights, even if evidence was found of their crimes, would simply claim Tom and others had Imperiused or threatened them and their families into complying with his demands. 
> 
> 3\. Agneza's maybe boyfriend Fred Avery couldn't take her to the dance because his grandfather and father were recently the victim of a werewolf attack. So. That puts a damper on things. I wanted to highlight how young and uncertain Mae in that of course she doesn't pick a necessarily great time to make a confession of feelings to Agneza, but the fact that it is the 1960s and the prejudices of the era also play a role in this. While the magical world is not necessarily *as* homophobic as the muggle world at this time, just as there is still sexism at play in wizarding society, there is also still bias against and distaste for anyone who doesn't identify as heterosexual. Mae is fourteen and unsure of how she identifies or what her feelings actually mean for her, which I think is also pretty common, especially given the time period and the lack of accessible media or books for Mae about non-hetero relationships.
> 
> 4\. Obviously believing as a young child that he may have in fact 'sucked the life out of' his own mother was not great for Tom's emotional development as a person, on top of his feelings of grief and abandonment over not having a family or parents of any kind. In case anyone forgot, Marvolo Gaunt died of natural causes before Tom ever went looking for both sides of his family, but he still framed his uncle Morfin Gaunt for the Riddle murders, and Morfin is currently still imprisoned for that crime.
> 
> 5\. How could I do another party scene without the 'enemies forced to dance together in extreme tension' trope? Next chapter we will see some more of Matthew and Lydia, as well as meet a werewolf in the flesh.


	45. Matthew VII - Lydia X

FEBRUARY 1961

LINCOLNSHIRE

Matthew has been in these words before, but never so close to dusk. The sun isn’t down yet, but it will be within the next two hours, and it is already darkening and hushed amidst the frost covered trees. There’s only a very thin layer of snow crunching underfoot, but it’s still bitterly cold, and his head is throbbing on and off from the the night before. 

Beth went to stay with his parents for the night, and he and Evelyn stayed up the way they had as newlyweds, drinking and listening to the countdown on the wireless, trying to be silly and young and romantic again, lighting candles and kissing on the sofa in their pyjamas. It was nice, though. Just to be with her again, without having to worry about who is looking after their daughter or what mischief she’s getting into or if he’s going to be summoned in to work unexpectedly. 

“We should do this more often,” she said at one point, petting his hair (which he’s afraid is starting to thin as he edges into his mid thirties), while he laid sprawled across their worn sofa with his head in her lap and his legs hanging off the edge, like he was a teenager again. He and Evelyn never dated at Hogwarts, though they were friendly with one another. They reconnected several years later at a mutual friend’s wedding, and that was it. 

He used to worry that their relationship lacked passion, that there was no great struggle for them to overcome or enemy to defeat. Everything seemed so simple and easy, almost alarmingly so. They dated for seven months, then decided they might as well get engaged; most of their former classmates were already married or on their way, after all. Less than a year later they tied the knot, and then two years after that came Beth. 

Matthew would not trade any of it for the world; he likes being settled, he likes having a wife and a family. Sometimes he wonders if she regrets it, though, if she resents him, if she always has, even before he went missing. If she feels abandoned or unappreciated as the wife of an auror, or like he doesn’t take her own work as a herbologist seriously, since so many of his colleagues’ wives don’t work. 

But the other night, she’d said, “I love you, Matt,” and kissed his brow. “I’m sorry if I don’t show it as I should. It’s just been- it’s been a rough go of it, these past few years. But Beth is getting older now, and- and I know you are trying to ease off work a bit, and-,”

He’d cut her off with a kiss of his own, twisting in her lap to pull her head down to his so their noses brushed, and they’d both chuckled over it like they were still just boyfriend and girlfriend, whispering and giggling in her parents’ sitting room, waiting to be interrupted or scolded for their indecency. 

She didn’t even seem that upset when he brought in today, though maybe that was because it was two in the afternoon when he got the owl, not the crack of dawn or late at night or in the middle of dinner. 

“Be careful,” she’d said. “Come home.”

And he’d made the usual promises- promises he has so far kept, since he came back to her from Spain- and here he is, on the outskirts of the Mulciber estate. It feels strange, almost uncanny, to be here a year after they found Castor dead and arrested Virgil, though he really shouldn’t feel like an unwanted interloper when it’s a matter of protecting the remaining Mulcibers from harm, unpleasant as they might be. 

Joan sighs as they finish their loop of the silent magical perimeter being established. Her eyes are tired and he knows she’s not pleased to be pulled away from Renata; they usually take this week off to spend time with Joan’s family, but it couldn’t be helped. Decker and Westerville are insistent that the pack is close, and maintain that now is the best time, just after the end of the full moon. 

Werewolves are obviously at their strongest once that full moon is overhead, but in the days and even hours just before it and just after it, Westerville insists, they are at their weakest, with their transformation close, the toll it takes on the human body. These wolves especially, Decker claims. They know they’re being hunted, they have no stable territory to claim as their own, so they’ve been running ragged around the country, one step ahead of their pursuers, never able to slow down and rest. If they can be ambushed before their transformation and captured, this is the best time to do it. 

January’s full moon finished last night. The Mulcibers haven’t dared set foot outside in days, and they’ve had hit wizards patrolling the house to make sure there’s no break-ins.

“I find it more than a little suspicious,” Joan says, after taking a swig of her thermos of hot tea, “That of all the sightings within the past two months, more than half have been in the vicinity of old pureblood estates. And that’s including what happened to the Averys.”

“That could still just be wrong place, wrong time,” Matthew says. “Fitzwilliam Avery was a fool to go out hunting so close to the full moon, knowing there was a pack somewhere out there. And these estates are are all large, wooded properties, not public parks or reserves. They’re not stupid. They’d know there’s less a chance of them being tracked if they stay on private land.”

“It just feels personal,” Joan says. “What happened to the Averys. Why would they attack two wizards, why wouldn’t they steer well clear-,”

“They’re bloody werewolves,” Matthew says. “I thought attacking humans was what they did. Or any game at all.”

“My mother used to tell me even the biggest beast in the wood knew to fear a witch,” Joan caps her thermos, shaking her head. “It’s the same with vampires, ghouls, poltergeists- they recognize the threat we pose to them. Far easier to go after unsuspecting muggles with no protection.”

“Well, maybe the beast takes over,” Matthew says. He does a passable imitation of Archibald Lacy, the decrepit old head of the Werewolf Capture Unit, who’s about as useful as a wet rug. “Man can only guess at what lies behind those canine eyes and gleaming fangs-,”

“Don’t start,” Joan elbows him. “The whole thing is a bloody embarrassment, is what it is. Sometimes I wonder if they were grown in a laboratory, to keep us running around like chickens with no heads. How many other cases have been shelved, while we go wild playing dogcatchers?”

Matthew can’t argue with that. There’s about two dozen aurors present tonight, a sizeable chunk of the department, half a dozen aurors, even a few witch watchers in case any of the werewolves started out as wizards. He and Joan make their way back to the trailhead, careful to obscure their tracks as they go. The perimeter consists of copied runes pasted onto trees. If one goes off, they’ll all react, which should make it harder for the wolves to escape. 

All thought of that goes out of the window, though, when he and Joan return to find Michael Applewhite speaking with Decker and Westerville, their three heads bent together like some kind of three-headed beast. Cerberus, he thinks, faintly, then steels himself as Applewhite glances over. 

“There they are,” he says brusquely. “Hansel and Gretel. You’re the last pair back from patrol.”

“I thought the hit wizards were handling security for the house,” Joan frowns. 

Matthew has never confided in her exactly what happened in Bilbao, but her mistrust of Applewhite since then has been palpable, something he is absurdly grateful for, that he doesn’t even need to give her an explanation for her to have his back.

“Oh, we are,” Applewhite seems mildly offended at having to explain himself, “But it seems to me you lot need all the help you can get. And I’ve handled werewolves before.”

He smiles, hard and fierce, revealing too-white teeth, at Matthew, who fights not to flinch or look away. He is not going to let Applewhite shake him. They are surrounded by aurors. Applewhite wouldn’t dare try anything right here. 

But once you’re deep in that wood, a little voice says, well, anything could happen, as the sun goes down. 

I’ll have Joan with me, he thinks. 

So what? He’ll kill her too. 

Then Pike’s voice rings out across the small clearing, calling for attention. Applewhite inclines his blonde head, and dips away into the crowd. Bonnie Decker glances after his muscular form appreciatively, which seems to annoy her partner, who shoots a dark look after Michael. 

“Alright,” Pike says, and Matthew is once again relieved that he’s here himself tonight. He doesn’t exactly distrust Decker and Westerville, or think they’re out to harm anyone, but they seem reckless and cocky, and between the combination of their arrogance and Applewhite’s brutality, things could get ugly very quickly. At least Pike’s aura of cold command will be something of a deterrent. Applewhite always seems more hesitant of defying him, at least. 

“As far as we are aware, none of the lycanthropes here have wands,” Pike says. “As far as we are aware, they are all muggles. But that is not an excuse for any of you to go in blindly believing you have the upper hand. Their senses are far better attuned than any of yours, they aren’t going to be intimidated by the cold or the dark, and they will not hesitate to attack if you give them an opening, even if they can’t transform fully. No one is to go stumbling off on their own. No one is to get any funny ideas about being a hero.”

He sweeps a cool stare over the group, his breath misting in the air, then says, “If possible, you are to take them alive. A simple stunning spell goes a long way. Don’t try to get flashy. If you cannot capture them alive, you are authorized to use lethal force if you believe your life or that of a colleague’s to be in danger. Be advised that there will be a stringent investigation of any and every death tonight.”

“That’d be a first,” someone mutters. 

With that said, they proceed. 

Matthew sets off on their preassigned path through the trees with Joan; in the distance he can just make out Henry Rowle and Royce Shacklebolt on their parallel route. The sight of their huddled figures, bent against the gusts of wind, is oddly reassuring. But he soon grows uneasy again, realizing he can’t possibly keep track of anywhere else. Decker and Westerville could be far behind or far ahead. Applewhite could be just behind any tree. 

Still, after a while, as always, the anxieties fade to a dull buzz in the background, and he feels himself bending to the task at hand. One foot in front of the other. Move quickly but quietly. Don’t light your wand yet, but keep it at the ready. Stay on the path given to you. Always be aware of your surroundings. His old training filters back to him, and he feels that odd satisfaction he always gets when he and Joan have fallen into a certain rhythm and are moving in tandem, anticipating each other’s steps, matching a pace. 

Before long, they are near the cave where the wolves are likely hiding; Matthew can tell because of the frozen stream they cross, which is like a black ribbon cutting through the grey wood. After they’re on the other side, he and Joan wait for a few moments, listening to the nearby hoot of an owl, the wind in the trees, the scurrying of a rabbit in the brush-

Then the first scream rings out, long and bloodcurdling, as if it could crack the frozen stream behind them in half, and they aren’t waiting any longer.

Matthew races forward with Joan, wand raised, skidding on the icy ground, as dark shapes stand out against the snowy landscape. His fellow aurors and hit wizards are easy enough to distinguish, in their blue and red uniforms, which means the other shapes, moving raggedly through the trees, must be- 

A crack rings out, then another, and Shacklebolt shouts, “THEY’RE APPARATING!”

If they can apparate, at least some of them must be wizards. And if they’re wizards, then they might have wands-

“ON YOUR RIGHT!” Matthew feels himself shout it before he even realizes what’s going on, as a shape comes bolting out of the brush at them. 

Joan whirls, sliding a little in her boots, and her first spell connects with the figure’s chest; they go flying backwards, slam into the trunk of a tree, and collide with the ground in a puff of ice and snow. “Stupefy!” Matthew shouts, when he sees them stirring; a man, he thinks, it’s a man-

They dodge, and rather than a scream or bellow of rage or fear, what he hears is closer to a feral snarl. “JOAN, GET BACK-,”

Joan jumps away with a shriek as the figure lunges at her, rather than try to run. She loses her balance and staggers, but manages to get up a shield charm in time, and the werewolf collides with her shield. 

“Petrificus totalus!” 

As the shield shatters, wavering in the dark air, Matthew’s spell collides, and they topple over, rigid. But there’s no time to inspect them; another shape goes flying by, pursued by Rowle, and then there’s the unmistakable crack of a tree being toppled. 

Someone runs into- or tackles- Matthew and he hits the ground hard, getting a faceful of snow and twigs as he rolls over, groaning. He shoves them off him, and feels something like teeth snap at his gloved hands- but that’s a human jaw, not an animal’s snout. He stares up in confused horror at the snarling, contorted face above him, before it vanishes. 

Joan is shouting something, as he jumps to his feet, brushing himself off, but whoever tackled him- he thinks it was a woman, actually- has vanished. He whirls around, and sees that while his paralyzing spell has not worn off on their quarry, the petrified figure has managed to roll themselves downhill into a gulch. Joan scrambles down after them; an arc of red light hits the silently thrashing person, and they still, unconscious. 

“Stay down there, it’s good cover!” Matthew shouts to her, just as a spell goes whizzing by his head, burning a hole in the tree behind him. 

He swears, casts a shield, and then hears the wails of the runic perimeter alarm going off; at least one of the werewolves has managed to break through them. Gradually the sounds of struggle and shouting in the twilit woods around him disappear, replaced by the sound of his colleagues calling to one another. Within a few minutes, the all clear signal is given; a shower of green sparks, exploding in the bruise colored sky overhead like a firework. 

“Abbott!” Rowle is coming towards him, looking a little dazed and rumpled- like he ran headlong into a tree, which is possible, but otherwise unharmed. “Did you catch one?” 

Another figure emerges from the bushes; Matthew tenses, wand raised, but it’s just Shacklebolt. He lowers his wand immediately as Royce joins them, looking annoyed and scratched up but also uninjured. “Well, that was a circus,” he says in annoyance, but Henry Rowle has already clambered down into the gulch to help Joan bring their prisoner up. 

Matthew watches warily with Shacklebolt as they do so, but the figure is still unconscious, by the looks of their lolling head and limp form. As they settle him onto the level ground, Matthew turns the golden light of his wand onto his face. 

“He’s just a kid,” Shacklebolt says in shock. 

Matthew is forced to agree, staring down at the boy. He’s tall for his age, with sloping shoulders and thick limbs; if he played quidditch he’d be an excellent beater or keeper. Matthew would put him at no older than seventeen or eighteen years of age; there’s still traces of baby fat in his slackened face, despite his underfed appearance. 

He might be big, but he’s clearly not as burly as he would be on a healthy diet. His hair is long and matted with dirt and grease, falling past his shoulders and in front of his closed eyes, which themselves contain bags and dark circles from lack of sleep. His clothes are ragged and don’t seem to fit; his shoes are falling apart on his feet, his trousers are cuffed up and full of holes and stains, and his shirt is covered in grime and muck. 

He’s not wearing a jacket or hat or any sort of protection against the cold, and his pale skin is covered in goosebumps, bruises, and scratches. His arms are full of peeling scabs, as are his neck, and his nose and lips are raw, cracked and splitting from the cold and exposure. 

“Jesus Christ,” says Rowle, toeing at him with his boot. “Look at the size of him. You alright, Joanie?”

“I’m fine,” Joan says shortly. “He knocked me over, that’s all.” She crouches down to feel the boy’s pulse. “We need to get him inside. He can’t be out here like this, he’ll catch his death.”

They all jump at the sound of distant shouts. Something about healers. 

“Someone’s been hurt,” Matthew says, scowling, and praying it isn’t Pike. That would be all too convenient, with Applewhite here.

But it’s not Pike, as Applewhite himself informs them a minute later, when he comes striding through the trees. It’s Decker. One of the fleeing werewolves took a hunk out of her neck, and she’s being rushed to St Mungo’s with Westerville and Pike at her side. 

“Amateur hour, as always,” he says. “I could have predicted this an hour ago. Far too full of themselves, those two-,” he trails off at the sight of the unconscious boy. 

“Well,” says Applewhite, drawing close, and unabashedly pushing past Shacklebolt to get a good look. “You did catch one. Color me surprised, Abbott, Harker. Didn’t think you’d have it in you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Joan demands warily, not moving from her crouched position besides the boy. 

Applewhite shrugs. “Henry here says you two are something of a soft touch, around the department. Bit sensitive for this line of work.”

Rowle turns red as a cherry, though that might just be the cold. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he says, lamely, shifting from leg to leg. “I was just kidding around, I mean-,”

“We need to bring him to the hospital too,” Matthew says, cutting him off. Shacklebolt nods firmly in agreement. “If we want to question him, we need to make sure he’s healthy-,”

“Oh, I don’t know if that’s necessary,” Applewhite says. The growing dark has cast his broad, chiseled face even more into the shadows, and Matthew is unpleasantly aware that with Pike gone, Applewhite is technically the highest ranking Ministry official here, as commanding officer of the hit wizards. 

“Seems to me, we just need to make sure he’s breathing and capable of responding to interrogation. We’ll bring him back to the holding cells, wake him up, see what he has to say when faced with the consequences of his actions.”

“He’s just a kid,” Joan says. “Look, we can’t just- he needs to be checked out by a healer. Anyone. We don’t even know if he’s a wizard or not-,”

“Of course he isn’t,” Applewhite snorts as if she just cracked a very funny joke. “He’s a werewolf, Harker.”

He flicks his wand, and the boy’s body begins to levitate, first a few inches, than several feet off the ground, his limbs still pinioned together by the invisible bonds of Matthew’s spell. 

“We’re taking him to Mungo’s,” Matthew cuts in, though he knows the last thing he should be doing is placing himself in the path of Applewhite’s ire. 

Sure enough, Applewhite glances at him almost incredulously, as if shocked Matthew said anything at all. He should be, Matthew realizes, with a flush of something like shame. After all, what sensible man would knowingly provoke his would-be murderer? It was nothing personal, he can almost hear Applewhite saying. You just couldn’t help sticking your nose where it didn’t belong, could you? Shame. 

“If you disagree with my choices, feel free to lodge a complaint,” Applewhite says coolly. “Otherwise, I think you’d better get back to the others and finish searching these woods, while I handle this. That goes for all of you,” he casts a sharp look around at the other aurors, but Joan clears her throat. 

“I agree with Matthew,” she says. “Per our codebook, any injured suspect is supposed to be immediately transferred to St Mungo’s for medical attention. Once he’s been cleared by healers as sound of body and mind, then you can-,”

“Excuse me?” For the first time, Applewhite sounds properly angry, not just patronizing or arrogant. “Do you think I need you to rattle off the codebook to me, Harker? Is this the sort of conduct Pike lets slide-,”

“She’s right,” Shacklebolt says. “And last I checked, you weren’t our direct supervisor, Michael. Why don’t we just wait for Pike’s orders. We can bring the boy inside-,”

“We can’t bring a werewolf into the Mulcibers’ home,” Rowle protests, though not very strongly. 

Matthew steels himself for things to get very unpleasant, and opens his mouth again. “I’m sending for a mediwizard,” he says. All aurors are expected to be able to cast a patronus on command. 

He takes a step back, ignoring Applewhite’s furious stare, and thinks of Evie and Beth. “Expecto-,”

A soft pop sounds just to his left, like a bubble bursting, and Pike reappears. There’s blood staining his hands and robes, but he doesn’t seem all that surprised by the scene before him. Nor does he waste any time in parsing out what’s going on. 

“The boy comes to the hospital,” he says, in a tone that brokers no argument. “Applewhite, take your men and report back to headquarters. Rowle and Shacklebolt can accompany you and start the reports of tonight’s activities. Harker, Abbott, with me.”

Applewhite scowls, but obeys. 

Matthew watches with relief as he apparates away, followed by a stunned looking Rowle and a grimly satisfied Shacklebolt. Matthew and Joan places their hands on the boy’s chest, as Pike grips his shoulders, and the forest around them vanishes, replaced in the blink of an eye- and a sharp, constricting sensation- by the lamplight of St Mungo’s wood-varnished waiting room. 

Within moments the boy’s been carted off, while Matthew and Joan follow Pike into the mercifully all-but-empty hospital canteen. 

“They think Decker will live,” he informs them bluntly. “But she lost a good deal of blood and she won’t be back on her feet for the foreseeable future. Westerville is with her now.”

“They care about each other,” Joan says. 

“They do,” Pike inclines his head, then sighs. “We’ll have a meeting about what happened tonight in the morning. For now I’m inclined to say it wasn’t a complete failure… no one’s dead and we captured one alive.”

“He’s just a boy,” Matthew says. “He… he may not have been with them willingly.”

“We’ll know more once he’s been released by the healers,” Pike says. “And once we know his identity. If he’s a muggle or not. For now, I want the two of you here, outside his room. Do not allow anyone in, besides the healers and nurses, without my explicit say-so. I don’t care who they are. Rowle. Applewhite. The Minister himself.”

Matthew exchanges a look with Joan. 

“You… you think someone might want to hurt him?” Joan asks slowly. 

“I don’t want anyone talking to him before we do,” Pike says. “And I don’t trust security here, never have. And that… what we saw, back in September,” he allows. “I have… questions about that I want to ask myself. Not after Applewhite or anyone else has paid him a visit.”

“Right,” Matthew says. He still thinks about that symbol, though he hasn’t been able to find records of it in any other files of past cases, opened or closed. It’s hard to forget the serpent emerging, victorious, from the mouth of the grotesquely grinning skull. Something about it feels mocking. Obscene, almost. A degradation of some kind, like a vandalized religious artefact. 

“We’ll keep watch,” Joan assures Pike. 

“Good,” he says. “You can alternate shifts, starting tomorrow. I’ll stay here tonight.”

He looks exhausted, and haggard in a way he usually does not, but maybe that’s just the brighter lighting of the canteen. Either way, Matthew doesn’t argue. He and Joan bid Pike goodnight, then make their way out of the hospital. 

“I wonder how old that boy was,” Joan says, as they step out into the cold January night air. “When he was bit.”

Matthew hadn’t thought of that. “Not too young, I hope,” he says. “That’s… it can’t be a good life, that.”

“It can’t,” Joan agrees, exhaling. 

They stand there together like that for a moment, outside the dilapidated department store that hides the front of St Mungo’s, and then head their separate ways, lost in their own separate thoughts. 

LONDON, FEBRUARY 1961

For a house as old and drafty as Grimmauld Place, the drawing room is shockingly stuffy, though maybe it’s just all the bodies crammed inside it, or the heavy curtains and overstuffed, musty Victorian furniture. Lydia could swear the Blacks haven’t bothered to change any decorations in the last century, besides adding a few new house elf heads to their walls. 

It’s a far cry from her own wedding shower three years ago, when she sat in the airy sunroom, smiling brightly for the cameras, hands clasped neatly in her lap, ankles crossed, as she opened gift after gift. Those same women will still make polite small talk with her now, but Lydia suspects it’s all tinged with something like pity. 

Poor Lydia, they think. She was so thrilled to be marrying him. And look how it’s turned out. He’s devoted to his work, and she has nothing to do but putter around uncle’s office, or keep house. And she hasn’t got any children for that house, either. Three years, and not even a suspicion she might be pregnant. It’s as if they never touch each other. Maybe they don’t. He must have a mistress. Already tired of her, likely. That’s not difficult to believe, knowing the Rosiers. He should have married a Malfoy. Or a Burke. 

I’m still young, she thinks, defensively, from her place of honor near the black marble fireplace, which towers over her, the hearth flickering with ever-changing colored flames, purely for aesthetic purposes. I’m still young, and I’m still beautiful, which is more than most of you can say. She lets her gaze skim across the crowd of upturned, moony faces critically. 

Most of the women she knows are married by now, or confirmed old maids. Some have been married for a decade without any children, nevermind three years. They have no right to judge her, or her marriage. They would all still kill to be in her shoes. Tom is young and handsome and charming, and thus far his tenure as Minister has been a rousing success story, a triumphant retort to years of mediocrity and indecisiveness. 

If it wasn’t, would Janice Goyle have come up to her asking so very delicately if there was a way she and her husband might be allowed to foster a reclaimed child? Or Lavinia Urquhart? What about Miranda Crabbe, who just lost another pregnancy last month? They need her. They might resent her, envy her, whisper about her when her back is turned, when they think she can’t hear them, oblivious, beautiful Lydia, but they still need her. 

Tom still needs her. Just last week he had her sweep in and out of the Daily Prophet, disguised as one of the new editorial assistants. Lydia sat at a desk for hours, copying down everything she heard, and none of those fools were any the wiser for it. The desk she sat at used to be Gilda Skeeter’s. 

It was cleared out, of course, but they’d just shoved her old name tag in a drawer, besides some crumpled up papers she left behind. Lydia combed through them when no one was looking, but they were nothing important, just some old grocery lists and a drawing her daughter must have made for her. 

That’s not her fault, either, what Tom did to her and the Princes. They made their own beds. Her conscience is clear of that, she reminds herself, sharply. They should have known better than to cross him like that. Does Irene Greengrass know her mother has paid a visit twice now to all but beg for her daughter’s life, to assure Tom that she isn’t plotting anything? She’s the subject of even more gossip than Lydia, arguably, taking up with some barrister and starting a career like that. Hardly suitable for a daughter of one of the old families. 

Walburga Black on the other hand, well, she’s their model image, isn’t she? Lydia glances back over at Walburga, who sits close by, round with child and smiling fiercely, almost defiantly, as if anyone might question her very obvious pregnancy. She showed off her firstborn when the shower began an hour ago, but before long Sirius began to fuss and was carted off up to the nursery by an aunt. Lydia didn’t think he was much to look at. The Blacks have always produced children with remarkably big heads, for their bodies. 

“Oh, this is just lovely,” Walburga says, holding up a silken quilt for inspection, to a chorus of compliments. 

It’s pale green and silver, shimmering in the firelight. Lydia doubts it has any practical use; that rag couldn’t keep a rat warm, never mind an infant, but Walburga folds it back up neatly on her lap, all smiles, which is a far cry from her usual scowls and sneers. 

If she thinks anyone is fooled by her playing the benevolent mother to be, she’s delusional. This is the same women who once threw a drink in her sister-in-law’s face during Missy Avery’s wedding. Everyone knows Walburga has always had far more temper than sense, just like her brother. Still, Lydia smiles along with the rest. Her own gift was a brand new cradle, though it’s not as if Walburga needs one; Sirius is still in nappies, for Merlin’s sake. What does she even need a bridal shower for? 

But it’s not about the gifts, she thinks, not really. It’s about Walburga showing off. Look what I can do. Look what I have. One son, and another on the way, a bouncing baby boy or girl. You should be jealous. You should want to be me. I am securing our future. You are hosting tea parties and writing letters and staring out the window, wondering if this is going to be the next thirty years of your life. 

Lydia isn’t jealous. She doesn’t want a child. She’s not stupid enough to say it aloud, but it’s nothing she dreams of. If she found out she were expecting tomorrow she wouldn’t even be relieved to know she’s not barren. Tom might be thrilled, or he might not. She’s not sure which would be worse; his pleasure, or his indifference. Usually, as of late, it’s been indifference. 

The other night she dared to tell him no, when he began to push up her nightgown. It wasn’t that she was afraid he would ignore her refusal. But she was afraid all the same, not of being physically harmed, but of- she doesn’t know what. His judgment? His contempt?

The ease with which he accepted it almost offended her. He didn’t look relieved, like he’d been hoping she’d say no, but he didn’t seem disappointed or irritated at all, just asked if she had a headache. 

“Yes,” she’d said, though she didn’t; her head felt heavy, but it didn’t hurt. She’d rolled away from him, tense, her arms wrapped around herself. 

“Alright then,” he’d said, as if she were a child reporting sick to the schoolteacher. “Sleep is the best thing for it. And you don’t have to,” he’d run his fingers briefly through her hair, as if to tell her that he didn’t mind if she slept, well, ‘naturally’, without any morphing at all, but she’d ignored that, and turned out her light. 

She can imagine his reaction if he knew what she was thinking, the scornful look that would cross his face, the slight note of incredulous derision in his voice. What did you expect, Lydia? Do you want to be ravished? Brutalized? What do you want? Shall I hold you close and whisper sweet nothings I don’t mean? Pet your hair like you’re an infant? Sing you a lullaby? Stop acting like a child. We agreed we would be sensible about this. 

He never promised to love her, and she never expected him to. She doesn’t feel betrayal or heartbreak; she never gave him anything of hers to mistreat or abandon. But she had- she supposes she had some childish delusion of… of some sort of emotional bond, of a sort of queer friendship, if nothing else. That it would be like they were… co-conspirators, judging the rest of the world through the same veil, sharing secret looks and smiles and inside jokes, even if they shared nothing else. 

He wasn’t looking for a partner, a voice like her aunt’s says. He was looking for a decoration. An ornament. At most, a tool. The sooner you accept that, the better. A girl of your breeding and background, comparing yourself to some-

She digs her manicured nails into her skirt as Walburga unwraps the next gift, a toy broomstick, and holds it up with a rueful expression as the women burst into cheers and laughter. 

“Don’t let Sirius near that thing!” Druella calls out, helpfully. 

I don’t compare myself to her, Lydia thinks. I don’t. She is nothing. We aren’t even on the same level. Why in Morgana’s name would I ever compare myself to some schoolteacher saddled with a bastard child and more enemies than she knows what to do with? 

Oh, they are still whispering and complaining about Benson’s admission into MESP, and there’s still complaints about her teaching, too. None of the other professors are that young, and none of them have illegitimate children, either.

But to see them dance together at that party, even briefly- Lydia won’t pretend it didn’t disconcert her. She wasn’t the only one; Albus Dumbledore looked like he’d just swallowed a few nails, and Finch, the professor who she was dancing with, glanced over at them one too many times, his jaw tight. 

It wasn’t as though they were dancing provocatively, though they did dance well, to Lydia’s irritation; of course Amy Benson couldn’t be clumsy, could she? No, that would be too much to ask for. Thank God she’s not beautiful. At least there’s that. And that dress was atrocious. That shade of green is not a December color. It looked more fit for a picnic in the park. 

No, it was the way Tom looked afterwards, that got to Lydia. She doubts anyone else noticed, but she can read him like a book, by now. He kept a straight face, but he was almost… she doesn’t know what the word would be. Giddy, no, but… lightened, somehow, yes. He was very pleased with himself, like the music was still playing in his head, long after she’d walked off the dance floor. And when they got home that night, he seemed reluctant to change for bed, as if he was worried the memory of it might fade all the sooner, when he took off his clothes. 

She knows that feeling. That was the feeling she had after he proposed, that very night. Like a… like a strange waking dream. She wasn’t in love. But something was carrying her, like cresting a wave without fear of drowning. Something was moving her, and she was letting herself be taken by it. 

That’s what he was like. 

The broom zips around the room, prompting squeals and more laughter, and Lydia takes advantage of the distraction to murmur something about needing to use the powder room, and steps out of the drawing room and down the cold hall into the kitchen, where the food is waiting, perfectly preserved, finger cakes and sandwiches and fruit, glistening wetly. 

To her dismay, Therese is there, fixing some flowers in a vase. Lydia hadn’t even noticed she’d left the room as well. 

“There you are,” she says, as if Lydia had come in to help her, specifically. “Go set these by the window right there, won’t you? Really. Can’t trust these elves with anything. I walked in and found one of the little ingrates trimming the stems. They don’t need to be trimmed. I saw them made up at the florist myself.”

Lydia takes the vase from her silently, and brings it over to the window sill, which looks out onto the walled courtyard behind the townhouse, full of potted shrubbery and ivy covered stones. A crow is pecking at something in the gravel. 

“Still the silent treatment, is it?” Tess sounds more bemused than anything else, and Lydia turns around with a bland, faint, smile. 

“Of course not. I’m just a bit tired, today.”

Her aunt’s response is to arch a single brow in question. Lydia flushes. “No,” she says, in response to the silent question. 

Tess sighs in disappointment. “Well, the very instant that you suspect you might be-,”

“I’m not,” Lydia snaps, and then, desperate to change the subject, “Where’s Valerie? I know school’s started up again, but it’s the weekend. Surely Dippet would let you take her out for the day.”

“Tony and I feel it’s best she stay there, for now,” Therese’s tone is suddenly guarded, leery. “We… ran into some difficulty over the break.”

Now it’s Lydia’s turn to arch an eyebrow.

“She tried to run off to see her…” Tess doesn’t have to finish the sentence. 

I don’t blame her, Lydia thinks, but instead she just says, “And how far did she get?”

“Not very. One of the elves found her trying to climb down the rose trellis,” Tess sighs. “She was… well, she was quite defiant. Tony was shocked. She swore at us, you know. Thank Merlin we took her wand ahead of time. She’s a fourth year, you know, and they do know some nasty spells.”

I’d like to see that, Lydia thinks, but instead she just says, “And what did you do about it?”

“Well, she was not permitted to leave her room for the rest of the break, naturally. I brought her meals up myself.” Therese’s tone curdles. “She dumped a bowl of soup down my lap.”

“Oh no,” Lydia says, before she can help herself. “Did it scald you?”

“Of course not,” Tess snaps. “It was lukewarm by the time she came out to eat it.”

More’s the pity. 

They lapse into silence. There’s the sound of more laughter, from the drawing room. Therese studies Lydia for a moment, as if trying to work something out, and Lydia turns her gaze back to the food, and snatches up a macaron to nibble on, ignoring her aunt’s reproachful look. 

“Thankfully,” Tess says, “Your husband has seen sense about the Slughorn matter. He’ll be rejoining the school, starting in the fall.”

This is news to Lydia. She chews, crunches, swallows. “Teaching what? I wasn’t aware anyone was retiring.”

“Potions, obviously,” Therese scoffs. 

Lydia wonders if this is some sort of bait. “Amy Benson teaches Potions now.”

“Yes,” says Therese, “well, exams scores are down, parents have complaints, and frankly, with the class sizes these days, they could use two professors for all of the core subjects. He will take the upper years, she the lower. And in time…” she shrugs. 

“Perhaps she needn’t take any of them at all. Really, I have nothing against the woman, but she is hardly a suitable example for impressionable young students, especially not with her own daughter in the school. She could easily make a living as a potioneer. Out of the public eye.”

Lydia says nothing. 

“I do find it interesting, though,” Tess says, slowly. “Tony says you were ever so keen to interview her, the year before last, when thing were just being set up, but he put you off onto Penvenen and a few others instead. Was that Tom’s doing?”

“I truly couldn’t care less,” Lydia replies, selecting another macaron. This one is pale pink, like a rosebud. “I confess she’s a bit of a curiosity, you know, what with her background, but I fail to see-,”

“I’ve heard he and her were friendly, back in their school days.” Therese is still watching her. 

“Have you?” Lydia raises her tone slightly in incredulity. “I can’t imagine.”

“Your brother claims they were quite close.”

Lyle needs to learn to keep his tongue quite close, when he’s been drinking. 

“Lyle likes to exaggerate anything for a joke.”

“I don’t think he was joking.” Tess comes around the table to her. “He claims that Tom…” her lips curl slightly in disgust, “tumbled her, when they were students. That the little slattern followed him around like a bitch in heat, pawing away for her chance.”

“Lyle is a pig,” Lydia says, through her teeth. 

“From the mouth of swine, the occasional pearl of wisdom,” Therese says, lowering her voice to just above a window. “Lydia, darling, you know I just want what’s best for you. So I have to know. Is there any possibility, that she and he… that the girl…,”

“No,” Lydia hisses. “Absolutely not. Lyle is- he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There’s no truth to it. Tom would- Tom would never do something like that, he wouldn’t sully himself with some mudblood-,”

“You’d be surprised,” Tess says, “how many of our men deign to sully themselves, for a lark, for a weekend, for an afternoon. Don’t lose your head, love. But if she is- if they have… you know what this could mean. For your marriage. For everything. It is crucial that this be handled properly.”

“Then why don’t you and he have a chat about it over tea and crumpets?” Lydia snaps, recoiling from her. “In fact, I invite you to it. Come right over, sit him down, and take him to task-,”

Therese’s eyes widen. “So it’s true?”

“I’m not having this conversation.” The kitchen now feels just as sweltering as the drawing room. 

Lydia moves towards the door, but her aunt catches her by the arm, nails digging into her wrist. “Lydia, do not walk away-,”

Lydia whirls, wrenches free, and snarls. Properly. With teeth. Therese jumps back in shock, white as paper. 

“Get a hold of yourself,” she says, but her voice shakes slightly, and her eyes are wide with something close to fear. 

“Careful,” Lydia says. That’s all. She runs her tongue over her teeth roughly, and turns back around. 

Careful, she thinks to herself. Careful now. It’s like you told him. You’re in the cold water now. The ice has cracked. Time to sink or swim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Basically the Werewolf Capture Unit of the Ministry has been so under-used and underfunded that it's pretty much useless at this point, totally overwhelmed by the sudden new influx of werewolves. 
> 
> 2\. Joan talking about how 'even the biggest beast in the wood knows to fear a witch' is a reference to Terry Pratchett's “A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.”
> 
> 3\. There is so much concern in pureblood circles about the very low birth rate that every pregnancy is generally celebrated as a big deal, especially a Black's. 
> 
> 4\. Unsurprisingly, Lyle, whose alcoholism has only worsened over the past few years, said something he really shouldn't have referring to Tom and Amy being... attached while at school in front of Therese, who is now all over that, concerned about anything that might threaten Tom and Lydia's marriage, their reputation, and Tom's success as Minister.


	46. Arthur II

LONDON, APRIL 1961

He ends up having to wait fifteen minutes longer than expected to get in the room. 

At this point it’s obvious that they’re stalling him, or at least Joan Harker is, Arthur thinks sourly as he shifts from foot to foot. June bought him a new pair of leather shoes for work for his birthday back in February, and now that he’s finally started wearing them, he’s sprouting blisters all over his ankles and toes. But it will be worth it, once he’s worn them down enough. 

Shoes and people, now that he thinks about it, might not be so different. Rarely do they fit perfectly the first time you interact with them. And it’s usually more about consistency than anything else, if you want to get on their good side. Tom could have hand-picked any number of people to be so close to him- Arthur wouldn’t go so far as to say right-hand-man, but surely somewhere along the function of a limb. 

He trusts Arthur because Arthur, while never having been distinguished for a brilliant mind or striking ambition or endless charm, is consistent. He shows up on time, he does what he’s told, and he produces results. 

Arthur would go so far as to wager that Tom even trusts him more than Applewhite. Michael is charismatic and intimidating and brave- no one is denying that. But he has a temper, he’s prideful, and he tends to underestimate his adversaries because he’s so use to easily bowling them over. 

That means sometimes he gets out of line, or behaves carelessly. Tom would never actually dispose of him, and not just because Michael Applewhite is one of the few wizards in this country capable of potentially defeating him in a duel. But he does carefully select what information he allows Michael to know, and when.

Arthur, though… well, there’s a reason Tom handed off this interrogation to him, rather than getting personally involved. If the head of the Office for the Improper Use of Magic wants to talk to a known werewolf whose pack has been flouting the Statute of Secrecy left and right, that’s one thing. If the Minister himself decides to come down and chat, that might raise eyebrows. 

Surely Minister Gaunt has better things to be doing than questioning juvenile delinquents. That sort of thing. And Tom is a busy man, these days. Passing new legislation, signing it into effect, keeping the old families appeased with a constant flow of rewards and promotions for their sons ands daughters… 

The door finally groans open. Joan Harker steps out, wiping at her face with a kerchief. Arthur raises an eyebrow, wondering if she was crying, which doesn’t seem likely- before she snaps at him, “He spit at me.” She looks incensed, but is clearly restraining herself from saying more. 

“I warned him that we can have him remanded back to the high security ward at Mungo’s if he doesn’t start talking soon,” she shoves her kerchief back in the pocket of her navy blue robes. “Good luck, Norbrook. Don’t think you’re getting any further with him than we did.”

Nevertheless, she’ll be listening through the two-way mirror, he’s sure. It’s blatantly obvious that Pike’s current hand-picked favorites- Harker, Abbott, and Shacklebolt among them- don’t trust him, and he doesn’t blame them. He wouldn’t trust them either. Hell, Pike doesn’t even trust him, he’s just an old man who knows how the game is played, and that a public show of faith in the Minister’s team is what he needs to keep Gaunt off his back. 

Off his back while he does what, is the question. The net is slowly closing in on these werewolves, and once they’re dealt with… Well, Arthur will be very interested to see what happens then, in this department. 

He enters the room, closing the door casually behind him. 

Two months in the hospital, at time being force fed because he refused to eat, and bathed regularly has done wonders for the boy on the other side of the table, his hands and legs manacled to the chair he’s sitting in with silver chains. They’re not taut, but that’s not a problem; he’s a lycanthrope, being so close to silver must be incredibly uncomfortable, though it’s not deadly to him in his human form. 

That human form peers at Arthur Norbrook contemptuously as he takes his seat across the table from him. 

“Well,” Arthur says. “That can’t be very comfortable.”

The boy says nothing.

“Would you like some water?”

Silence. He just blinks, hatefully. 

“I’m sure you’re sick of people asking you questions by now,” Arthur says, shuffling the papers in the folder in front of him. “So I’ll talk for a bit, is that alright?”

The lips curl back to reveal crooked, yellowed, and sharpened teeth, as if he filed them himself, but still no sound. 

“Feel free to correct me if I get any of the following wrong,” Arthur says mildly. “Your name is Ralph Greyback. You were born February 17th, 1943, to Leslie Greyback, a wizard, and his wife Hilda, a muggle. Cheers. Our birthdays are quite close; I’m the 19th. And I’m a halfblood as well.”

“That’s not my name,” the boy growls; there’s no other way to describe it. Arthur doesn’t think he’s putting on much of a show; he sounds naturally husky, and hoarse from lack of speech on top of that. 

“Really?” Arthur adjusts his spectacles, peering at him curiously. “And what do you call yourself, then?”

A long beat of silence, and then the boy raises his chin slightly, where fresh stubble is emerging, and says, with a certain proud edge, “Fenrir.”

Arthur resists the urge to smile or smirk. That will just provoke the boy, and he doesn’t want that. “Fenrir. And when did you begin to go by this?”

“When I was born.”

Arthur glances back down at the file. “When you were turned, that is? In 1948. You were five years old, is that correct? You’re lucky. Most children that young don’t survive the Bite.”

“I was strong,” Fenrir says. “Always have been.”

“You were treated at St Mungo’s, where the diagnosis of lycanthropy was confirmed. Your mother and father were advised of a treatment plan. Confinement during the full moon, and heavy sedative potions before and after, to minimize harm to yourself or others. And your status as a werewolf was registered with the Ministry.”

Fenrir sneers silently, but doesn’t comment. 

“Your father abandoned the family shortly thereafter, leaving you under the care of your mother.”

Still silence. 

Arthur reads the next bit out much more slowly. “You had a younger sister, Helen. She was killed the next year, in 1949, by you, during one of your transformations. Your mother claimed you convinced her to come to you, in the night, so you could turn her as well.”

“I was six,” he says. 

“You claim your mother was lying?”

“I claim she was a mealy mouthed cunt who couldn’t wait to wash her hands of us both, after my old man took off.” 

That’s the most Arthur has heard him say since this interview started. 

“Very well,” he says. “Following this incident, your mother signed away her rights to you, making you a ward of the Ministry. You were placed with a foster family, with the understanding that during the full moon, you would be cared for by healers from St Mungo’s.”

“You mean drugged up and chained to a wall,” Fenrir sneers. 

“You ran away within a few months of this, and were declared missing after that. You were found seven months later, living under a bridge in Herefordshire. Over the course of the next five years, you intermittently ran away, were taken back into custody, and escaped again, until you went missing aged eleven, and were not seen again.”

“No Hogwarts letter for me,” Fenrir says, in a mocking, high-pitched sing-song voice. “They scratch you off the list if they don’t like the smell of you. You didn’t know? Dogs don’t get wands.”

“Nevertheless, a wand was found on your person when you were arrested in February of this year.”

Fenrir scratches at the arm of his chair with a nail; his fingernails are long and filthy, and from the fresh scabs on his neck and wrists, it seems obvious he scratches himself regularly. 

“How did you get that wand?” Arthur asks. “Did you steal it?”

Fenrir shrugs, then winces as the silver chains jangle lightly, as if in warning.

“Did you take it off a corpse?”

The boy grins; a long, feral stretch of cracked lips and crooked, yellowed teeth. He's missing at least one, and his gums are bloody red. 

“Fenrir,” Arthur says, as if tasting the name on his tongue. “That’s from Norse mythology, isn’t it? You must have some education. Who taught you about that?”

Silence.

“Fenrir was a wolf,” Arthur half-closes his eyes as if trying to recall, “who was the child of the god Loki, wasn’t he? A great monster of a beast. Who was his mother?”

“A giantess,” Fenrir says. “Angrboda.” His accent on that is surprisingly good. 

“And what was she the goddess of? Loki was the god of mischief and lies, I know that.”

Dark eyes meet his own. “Nothing,” he says. “Her name means she-who-offers-sorrow.”

“Is that what you offer, Fenrir? Sorrow, to the magical world?”

“The magical world,” Fenrir says, spiteful. “You think this is your world? You think you control all of this? If muggles knew what you were,” Fenrir spits, “They’d blow you off the face of the earth with a fucking atomic bomb.”

“You too, I imagine.” Arthur keeps his tone bland, unaffected. 

“At least I’m honest about what I am.”

“And what’s that?”

“A monster.” That sickening smile again. He clearly takes pride in the idea of inspiring terror, even loathing, in others. Arthur is careful to keep his expression blank, neutral. The boy wants him to stalk out in disgust, or lose his temper and call him names. 

“A monster,” he echoes him. “That’s what you see yourself as?”

“Why not? No one’s disagreed,” Fenrir scoffs. “You like to think of us that way. As old legends. Boogeymen you tell your children about, to keep them from wandering off into the woods alone.”

“There’s not many woods left,” says Arthur. “Do you know much our wilderness has decreased, since the Industrial Age began? What do you expect will be left in another fifty years for you, Fenrir? Some scattered national parks? A few private estates? Most are being sold off and chopped up for vacation rentals and rows of flats.”

The boy’s brow furrows. “What are you getting at, human?”

Human. As if he were another species entirely. Then again, Arthur thinks, watching a vein jump in Fenrir’s thick neck, he almost is. 

“There is less and less space for you to hide. So unless you and your companions mean to swim the Channel someday soon-,”

“Fuck you,” Fenrir snaps in disgust. “You know nothing about us. You never will. You just want to sit here in your suit and tie,” he licks his chapped lips in disgust, “and lecture- your life means nothing. Nothing! You’re a fucking automaton. At least we’re actually living. We have a purpose. A place in the world.”

“And that is?” Arthur asks patiently. “What do you see as your purpose, Fenrir?”

But he clamps back up.

Arthur sighs. “Fine. By the aurors’ reckoning, your pack numbers thirteen. I’m assuming you are not the de facto leader-,”

“Because I’m young?” Fenrir snaps.

Because you’re an idiot, Arthur thinks, deluded into believing he’s ascended to a higher plane of existence because you had the misfortune to be bitten as a little boy. Instead he says, “Because your… compatriots haven’t been caught yet. I assume if you were the leader, they would have splintered off by now, and we’d have located at least some of them.”

There is palpable relief pouring off the boy at this; he may be a fool, but he obviously cares for the other members of his pack. “You’ll never stamp us all out,” he says. “It only takes one wolf to breed a thousand more. Remember that, human.”

I wonder who taught you this, Arthur thinks. I’d be very interested to have a chat with them as well. 

But he only says, “It was foolish of you to be found so close to a magical home, though. You must have known that was risky. Muggles pose far less of a threat to you than we do. They’re oblivious. Defenceless. Why so close to the Mulcibers?”

He gets the answer he was looking for in the shadow that passes over Fenrir’s pock-marked face. It wasn’t just coincidence. They were there for a reason. Some sort of vendetta.

“The Averys, too,” he says. “You took them by surprise, but you must have known we’d be on high alert after that. Why would you risk being caught or killed like that? You could find much easier prey- human or animal- somewhere else. Whose idea was it, to close in on them? Your leader’s, I assume?”

But Fenrir just presses his lips together, biting down hard on the lower.

“It is very possible that Pike will manage to procure a court order of Veritaserum to be administered to you,” Arthur says. “Trust me, you won’t find that to be a pleasant experience, Fenrir.”

“Do your worst, bastard,” the boy hisses instead. 

“Alternatively,” Arthur continues. “They might just decide you’re not worth the fuss, and pack you off to Azkaban. I know you’ve found the hospital stifling, but a maximum security cell in that prison will make Mungo’s look like a paradise, believe me. You won’t even have to contend with human guards. It will be you and the Dementors, and they won’t be so kind as to sedate you every full moon. You’ll be clawing yourself open once a month, alone, in the dark and the damp and the cold, for years to come.” 

He pauses to gather more steam, then continues. “You’ll never breathe fresh air again, or feel the grass under your feet. Never run through the forest, or drink from a steam. You’ll be chained to a wall, with a silver collar around your neck. And it sounds like you know something about what that might be like, Ralph.”

Fenrir jerks forward in his seat, then yelps in pain as the silver chains constrict around him, sounding much younger than eighteen for an instant. 

“You’re an adult,” Arthur says. “You’ll be tried as such. Even if they can’t get you for anything else, they have you for attempted murder and assault on an auror, as well as possession of a stolen wand. You’re looking at a fifty year sentence, and that’s if the Wizengamot is feeling merciful. I doubt it, since they know your pack is responsible for the death of George Avery and the maiming of his father Fitzwilliam. The members of your pack are now wanted dead or alive. If they’re killed as humans, they’ll be buried in unmarked graves. As wolves, well, they might find their heads mounted above a fireplace.”

“I’ll kill you,” Fenrir promises him. “And I’ll enjoy it, little man.”

Arthur smiles at him banally. “You won’t, because you’re going to die in prison, unless you start cooperating with us. You might even die before prison. If you think werewolves were reviled when you were a child… well, I can’t say you’ve done much for their image.”

“Fuck you,” the boy rants, as he stands up, collecting his things. “And fuck your Knights!”

That gives Arthur some pause. “Is that it, then?” he asks, softly.

“You’re nothing without your wands,” Fenrir Greyback snarls at him. “Nothing. Just weak, broken men. Shivering sacks of meat. I could tear you apart, suck the marrow from your bones, and still be hungry. You think you’re dangerous? Think you’re special? Playing at dark magic?” He grins again. “I am dark magic. I don’t need a coward's mask.”

He’s right. He doesn’t. He has a face only a mother could love, and evidently she couldn’t hack it, either. 

Arthur leaves the room, shutting the door firmly behind him. 

Harker is already gone, but Applewhite is there. Arthur braces himself, expecting Michael will demand his own chance to interrogate the boy, but to his surprise, for once Applewhite seems deadly serious, not smug grin or derisive looks. 

“Gaunt wants you in his office,” he says. “Now.”

For the first time in months, a chill races down Arthur’s spine. Applewhite’s tanned face is unreadable. But he forces himself to just nod, and follows after him, careful to look unfazed, slightly harried, if that, not disturbed or frightened, as they pass aurors, hit wizards, and witch watchers in the halls. 

If he ever finds out, June once said to him, stroking their sleeping son on her chest, if he… Arthur. If he finds out, and you can’t- if I can’t- if it’s too late, and we can’t end it…

I know, Arthur had said. I know, darling. 

He does know. Tom passed the killing of the Princes off on Applewhite, but this, well, he would handle this betrayal himself. And it wouldn’t be quick, either. Fire is a terrible way to go, but at least it’s a hasty one. The smoke inhalation usually gets you first. 

For this… Arthur has no doubt he’d suffer for a very long time, and he would see June and Sean killed before his eyes, too. He’s not under any delusions of who he’s dealing with. 

Fenrir Greyback was not wrong when he brought up masks. Tom Gaunt, Tom Riddle, whatever you want to call him- he’s never needed a mask either. He isn’t powerful. He is power. And that would be true if he were a vagrant out on the street, or a hermit in a tower, it has nothing to do with his official title or position or wealth or marriage. 

He plays by a certain set of rules- the rules they all collectively call ‘governance’ because it suits him. For now. The instant he stops winning that game, he’ll simply upend the board, and start a new one. One with far fewer rules, and far greater rewards. And there will not even be the semblance of choice in that one. 

Tom is reading when Arthur enters the office with Applewhite, but not in a leisurely manner. He’s half risen from his broad desk, one hand flat on the desk top, the other clenched around the crumpled letter in his grasp. As Applewhite shuts the door behind them, he glances up, and Arthur is momentarily taken aback, as he always is, by the look in his eyes. Often it’s what Shakespeare would have called lean and hungry, like yond Cassius. It’s still lean now, but it’s the look of having just bitten into something you don’t like the taste of; bad fish, a rotten apple. 

“Have you told him?” he asks Applewhite brusquely.

Michael shakes his head, chastened. 

“There’s been an incident at Azkaban,” Tom tells Arthur. That he’s trying to sound calm and even-keeled is obvious, though he looks anything but. “Several prisoners escaped last night. It was just reported.”

This, Arthur wants to say, is the cost of having a prison where the large majority of the staff are Dementors, but he knows better than to open his mouth right now. 

“As of right now,” Tom continues, tensely, “It seems that Virgil Mulciber, Jaime Isola, and Morfin Gaunt were among them.”

That does shock Arthur; it’s the first truly shocking thing he’s heard all day, and he lefts it show, his jaw slackening. “Are you sure?”

There’s a clatter at the window; another owl arriving with a message, but this one is just ordinary mail; a cheery pink greeting card envelope. Tom tosses it aside, then rereads the message on his desk. 

“I can send out the first search parties now,” Applewhite begins, tentatively. “Where do you advise we-,”

“Everywhere,” Tom snaps. “I want you everywhere at once, do you understand? I want you here, I want you in Dover, I want you in Liverpool, in Cardiff- every bloody port or possible exit out of Great Britain.”

When he’s angry, Arthur notes, as he always, genuinely furious, and loose enough to show it properly, lips curling back, eyes narrowed, you can hear the Cockney slip back in. His roots are showing. But he reels it in within the next few moments, and manages to say in a calmer tone, “I want them dead on sight. No recapture. And no press. This doesn’t leave this office. I will not have a prison break marring the public’s confidence in this government.”

Applewhite looks like he wants to say something, but thinks better of it. “Of course,” he makes to go, and seems relieved when Tom doesn’t stop him from slipping out of the office.

That leaves the two of them.

“They’ll be found,” Arthur says quietly, approaching the desk. Tom has slowly sat back down, his hands resting on his temple for once, mussing his usually neat and slick dark hair. He looks younger than thirty four when he glances up like that; unlike many men his age, he shows no sign of greying or balding, and his smooth face is missing the laugh and smile lines around the eyes and mouth that many men’s bear. “You know we’ll recover them soon enough. Isola is the only one with any experience getting across borders- Gaunt is an old man, Mulciber’s a dimwitted brute-,”

“If any of them,” Tom says, “if any one of them, were to… to reconvene, with certain enemies… Isola in particular, I-,” he cuts himself off, a rarity, than shakes his head, pressing his lips together. 

“Isola is a crook,” Arthur says. “A con man, a murderer, an unrepentant thief. No one will believe a word that comes out of his mouth.” Inside, he thinks he could do a little dance. This is an unexpected boon. 

If Isola can slip the noose- and Gaunt, the uncle, God only knows what kind of information he might have- Tuft will be thrilled to hear this. Pardons can be arranged later on down the line. They just need to stay alive, and out of Applewhite’s grasp. If Mulciber is the only one caught and killed, it’ll be a blessing in disguise. 

“I was short-sighted,” Tom says, as he rifles through his desk for paper and pen. “I should have tied some knots off better. Isola- we had him. We had him, and I-,”

“You showed mercy,” Arthur says. “Most would argue that’s necessary, in even the strongest of leaders, from time to time.”

Tom glances up at him again coldly, and he regrets it. 

“Spare me the Sunday school platitudes,” he says, sharply. “Mercy? You were there, when we caught him. Did that look like mercy to you?”

“You spared his life.”

“So he could rot in a windowless cell, not so he could make me look a fool again.”

Arthur knows he could be balancing on a needle here, but it’s worth the risk. “If he… if the… the forgeries, you discussed, if that has anything to do with- I mean to say, if he might have access to… to something of value to you-,”

“No,” Tom says, and that’s that. Arthur does not dare push it any further. “Sit down, Norbrook.”

He sits. 

“I’ll indulge you,” says Tom. “I’m going to ask you to tell me a story. You Ravenclaws like this sort of thing, don’t you?”

“Usually,” Arthur says, with a dry, nervous edge. 

“Are you familiar with the Tales of Beedle the Bard?”

It’s so unexpected he almost chuckles out of shock. “Of course. Bedtime stories.”

“Not for me,” says Tom. “I had no experience with them until I was a grown man, myself. But that’s alright. I was never one for bedtime stories.” He’s still looking down at his paper as he writes, and continues, “What about The Warlock’s Hairy Heart, do you know that one?”

“Yes,” says Arthur, uncertainly. 

“Recount it to me. Concisely.”

Somewhere in this darkened, oversized office, a clock is ticking. Arthur remembers when Tuft was in residence here. It felt homier then, somehow. More plants, maybe, softer materials. Now it’s harsh and stark, any excess furniture or mementos cleared out, swept away. Spotless, but cold, brutal. 

“Once,” he says, over the scratching of the pen, “there was a warlock. Though he was young, he was powerful, intelligent, and charming. Nor did he want for money; his father had left him a vast inheritance. He could spend his days and nights testing the limits of his magic.”

“He looked around at his peers, however, and was disgusted by what he saw. Men he once had regarded as brilliant quickly set aside their research and experiments when they fell in love and had children. They rejected success and fame for more mundane interests, for ordinary lives. This disturbed the warlock, who feared that one day the same would happen to him.”

Arthur swallows. 

“Go on,” says Tom. He’s trying to sound disinterested and aloof, but it’s clear he’s listening intently, as if he’d never heard this story before, though Arthur knows he has. 

“To prevent this, he turned his attention towards the Dark Arts, and devised a way to separate himself from these troublesome emotions. By a spell of his own creation, and a dark and sinister ritual, he spliced his heart from his own chest, while preserving his life. He sealed the empty cavity back up, and enshrined his heart in a crystal casket. He locked the casket away in the dungeon below his castle.”

“But over the next few years, he realized that for all of his power and intelligence, society regarded him as an oddity, for his lack of a wife. They lamented the end of his family line, for how would he ever sire children to carry on his name? What was worse than their derision, their disapproval, he found, was their pity. Above all else, the young warlock could not stand to be pitied.”

The scratching of the pen continues. The owl on the windowsill gives up on beginning for a treat, and wings off into the grey skies outside.

“His pride wounded, he decided he would take a wife. She had to be beautiful, he decided, and magically talented as well. She should also be wealthy, and of good breeding, so that none could ever mock him for his choice in bride. With this in mind, he ventured out into the wider world for the first time in years, and by fate or fortune-,” 

Arthur pauses, then continues, “By fate or fortune, he happened to meet just such a woman. She was young, and she was beautiful, lovely beyond belief. She was a powerful witch in her own right, and her family was of the highest standing.”

“The warlock could not love her at first sight, though if he still had his heart within his chest he might have. But he could desire her, and he did. He wanted her the way he wanted many priceless and powerful things. It seemed she was meant for him. She felt no such attraction. Though he was handsome, wealthy, and intelligent, she could not help but feel revolted by him, even as her friends and family chided her for her good luck in securing his notice.”

“Something about him fascinated her, but at once it repulsed her as well. It seemed to the maiden, who was a clever girl in her own right, that while he was charming and well-spoken, there was a certain hollow ring to all his words, and the look in his eyes spoke not of love or friendship, but of greed. And of fear.”

Tom sets down his pen, and folds his hands in front of him, like a student attending his teacher’s words.

“Still, she accepted his invitation, and that very night, her family and she dined with him in his castle. The feast he had set out for them was exquisite. Every dish set one’s mouth to watering, and every drink made one thirst for more. His servants were polite and attentive. His home was beautifully decorated, with treasures and ornaments from all over the world.”

“Minstrels played and performed for the maiden in her family, and the warlock attended on her every word, flattering and complimenting her beauty, her grace, and her intelligence with his every breath. He spoke poetry to her, though she recognized none of the words past his lips were his own.”

“My lord,” said the maiden, “Your words are lovely beyond measure, much as you claim of me. Yet I could better believe them, if only I thought they came from the heart. You see, sir, they whisper you have gone without one, these past few years.”

“Though she meant to goad him into anger, the warlock was intrigued by her bold nature. Convinced she would be amazed by his power, he insisted she accompany him to see his heart. Laughing in disbelief, the maiden agreed, and left her family behind at the feasting table.”

“Together, they descended into the dark and gloom of his dungeons. There, in a small, musty chamber, he unveiled the casket, and within it, his heart. It no longer resembled a human organ at all. It did not bleed, it did not beat, only twitched every so often, rotted black and covered in tufty hair.”

Tom is looking directly at him now, his gaze piercing. Arthur almost loses his nerve, but forces himself to continue.

“Though shocked by the truth of the matter, the maiden rallied her courage, and demanded he reclaim his heart, if he meant to win her affection. The warlock agreed, believing he could just as easily remove it again, once it had served its purpose in securing her hand. He opened his chest with a spell, and slid it back inside as she watched in frightened, fascinated silence. Once he had replaced it, so stunned and amazed was she, that she came forward to embrace him.”

“But the heart that he returned to himself was not the same heart he’d cut out. It had changed, warped beyond recognition, and now there was no potential for love left in it, only hunger. And when she innocently wrapped her arms around him, all the warlock felt was all-consuming hunger. His own blighted heart was not enough. But hers might be.”

“He tore it out with his bare hands and teeth, her heart, as she kicked and screamed and hit, but her family far above them did not hear her cries for help, as they ate and drank and toasted their host’s generosity. Yet he could not fit two hearts within one chest, and his own hairy, rotten heart had no room left for magic.”

“When he could not remove it with his wand, he picked up a knife, and hacked it from his chest. Hours later, when the maiden’s family and his servants went searching for them, they found the two of them, in the dark and cold, besides a shattered crystal casket. The warlock lay dead across the maiden’s butchered corpse, a heart in each hand.”

Silence follows the end of the story. Arthur shifts in his seat, wood creaking. 

“What do you suppose the moral of that was?” Tom asks, turning over his hands, as if to examine them. As if checking to make sure they are still clean. 

“That love is more valuable to men than power, in the end,” Arthur says. “That’s what I always assumed it meant. That… ambition and pride can only carry us so far.”

“The woman,” Tom says. “The maiden. Why do you think she embraced him?”

Arthur is wondering if this is all some complex mind game, but he almost thinks this question is entirely genuine. Gaunt sounds… well, confused. 

“Why did she… embrace him?”

“Yes,” says Tom. “He’d shown her his heart. She knew what it looked like. She knew he was a monster. A man without a soul. Why would she demand he put it back in his chest? Why would she go to him, then? A sensible person would have run out shrieking in terror from the moment they realized the truth. Of what he’d done to himself.”

Arthur is silent for a few moments, then allows, “I suppose she saw… the potential for change in him. For redemption. She believed he could… that he could love her, genuinely, if he took back his heart, if he was willing to be vulnerable again.”

“What an exceptionally naïve decision,” Tom says. He clears his throat. “You may go.”

Arthur stands, slowly, in a little disbelief himself. “You don’t… you wouldn’t rather I stay-,”

“No,” says Tom. “It’s getting late. I’ve kept you long enough. You have your own… hearts to get home to, don’t you?” He smiles thinly, then plucks up the unopened card. 

Arthur is almost to the door when Tom says, all amusement vanished from his tone. “Take a look at this.”

Bracing himself, he turns back, and does. It’s a generic, store-bought anniversary card. Tom and Lydia Rosier’s third wedding anniversary was just a week and a half ago. But that’s not what it’s celebrating. 

In a scrawl Arthur recognizes from various court documents and affidavits, Jaime Isola has written, in loopy, inky, mocking cursive, “¡¡FELIZ ANNIVERSARIO, BEBE!!” 

Arthur jumps back as it bursts into blue flames, the cheap, stained paper curdling into ashes in Tom Gaunt’s grip. 

“Charming,” he says, venomously. “When he’s caught again, I want him burned too. Slowly. We’ll call it a feast and send out invitations."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. It's been so long since we had a chapter without a POV split, it feels almost weird. On the other hand, I'm praying I can get this fic finished in another 20 chapters, so fingers crossed. 
> 
> 2\. I thought it'd be interesting to get another look into Arthur's head now that we know he and June are double agents. He's not the most riveting of POVs but I do think he's interesting to write because of his moral grayness. While ultimately he is against Tom and the KoW, he also has no compunctions about threatening or hurting other people who are in the way of his aims, and he shares the prejudice against werewolves that many wizards display. 
> 
> 3\. Surprise! How could I not get Fenrir in here, one of the few named werewolves in canon. Obviously he is quite young at this point in the story, and he hasn't quite become the deranged character he is in the books, but he's clearly already riding that werewolf supremacy train and has a lot of ideas about werewolves creating enough numbers to actually threaten magical society. I also thought 'Fenrir' sounded a lot like a name a young werewolf might pick for himself as a mythology reference. Fenrir has totally detached from his wizarding roots and believes that werewolves, having the innate magical power to transform and to transfer lycanthropy onto others, are superior to wizards. The violence and mistreatment he faced as a young werewolf has not endeared him to the Ministry or St Mungo's. 
> 
> 4\. At this point in HP canon, wolfsbane potion has not been invented. The advised treatment for werewolves is to basically drug them up and chain them up during the full moon so that they can't attack anyone or run away. This is, predictably, awful and traumatizing, especially for a child to go through on a regular basis. There's not a bunch of child werewolves out there so there's no official policy on it, but Hogwarts refused to admit Fenrir as a student, and he was never permitted a wand, which means his magic has pretty much been exploding out of him over the years, on top of him trying to 'force' his transformations even when there is no full moon, as he prefers his life as a werewolf to his life as a human. 
> 
> 5\. So Fenrir, at least, clearly has some grudge against the Knights of Walpurgis, or is at least aware of their existence, and the other members of his pack seem to know about them as well, and have some link to them, given that they made the Dark Mark in one of their caves with a bunch of stones. Whether that was meant to herald the Knights or to threaten them is unknown to our main characters.
> 
> 6\. While Arthur and June believes (or at least June believes) they can depose and kill Tom, Arthur is also very well aware, from years of experience, of what Tom does to traitors, and knows that if ever finds out they are double agents, he will not just murder them in the most slow and excruciating manner possible, but kill their baby son as well. It was one thing when Arthur and June just had to worry about each other's safety, but now they have a child to look out for, which makes them a bit more cautious. 
> 
> 7\. As it turns out, having your prison run almost entirely by Dementors is maybe not the wisest choice for preventing escapes. And covering up a prison break is no small thing, especially when Tom has reason to beware of Morfin Gaunt (his uncle who he framed for the Riddles' murder), Virgil Mulciber (who the pureblood elite pretty much abandoned once he was accused of his uncle's murder), and Jaime Isola (well, Jaime has very obvious reasons to want Tom dead). 
> 
> 8\. Arthur doesn't quite know about the horcrux, but he is aware that Tom had some valuable magical item that Jaime once made a forgery of, and that the item is still missing. 
> 
> 9\. Unlike most magical children, Tom and Amy didn't grow up with the Tales of Beedle the Bard, and didn't hear about them until they were adults. The Warlock's Hairy Heart is one of them; Arthur is just retelling it here. It has some very obvious parallels to Tom and Amy's relationship. I'm actually shocked I never much considered that until recently.
> 
> 10\. It's about a year since Tom had Jaime thrown in prison, which is why Isola sent him a very mocking anniversary card. It's safe to say he's out for blood.


	47. Lydia XI - Valerie I

NORTH YORKSHIRE, JUNE 1961

LYDIA

Lydia is tempted to simply turn around and go home all the way up to the front door. These shoes are hurting her feet; she stubbed her toe on a corner while walking around the house barefoot the other day, and it ended up swelling and bleeding under the nail. Tom’s no good at healing, and they had a bruise reduction ointment in the medicine cabinet, which brought down the swelling, but it’s still stiff and sore. 

In high heels, it’s agony, and she tried wearing her flats, but they looked absurd with her dress. She’s not dressed very formally; this was just supposed to be something of a family dinner, but of course, by luck or fate, it’s been narrowed down to just her, her aunt, and their ward. 

Lyle was unsurprisingly the first to drop out, with some excuse about working overtime. Working overtime through a bottle of vodka, maybe. Cecily refused to go without him and said she was too stressed with the children anyways to even consider wrangling them for dinner. Her parents suddenly recalled they had a prior engagement and couldn’t make it. 

And now Tom has abandoned her as well, with some last minute meeting with, who else, her uncle. Something about Slughorn. She suspects they want to put him through the wringer one last time, remind him where his loyalties really lie before they release the old man back into the wilds of Hogwarts. Lydia herself questions how trustworthy he really is, but Tom seems confident Horace would never dare betray him, and points out that even when he ran the first time, he never informed on the Knights of Walpurgis, not like the Princes. 

She should have canceled herself, or faked sick, or something, but she couldn’t come up with any excuse that Tess would have accepted. Lydia had this problem as a child as well. She’d sometimes not be openly defiant, but instead try to wriggle her way out of things, but her aunt always saw right through her. Yes, Therese has always been good at that. Her stomach twists with anxiety and anger. This isn’t fair. It’s not right. She’ll be twenty six years old this year, and she still behaves like a frightened, sullen little girl around her aunt. She should cut Tess off entirely. 

But that’s just not done, is it? No one disowns their parents, no one disowns their aunts. Occasionally someone like Alphard Black or Irene Greengrass are stricken from the family tree, but that’s supposed to be a punishment, not an escape, though it probably was for them. Lydia wonders what she would have done, had her family suddenly decided she was dead to them once she turned seventeen. Wept with relief? 

But she’s being childish. What would she be without them? She doesn’t have any actual skills, beyond what Tess trained her to do. She could never work a regular job, or fend for herself in the real world. She’s like… like some kind of domesticated animal. A pet. In the wilderness, she’d be eaten alive. 

That makes her think of the werewolves again. Lydia has been following the case closely; it’s become something of a private obsession for her, really, but they’ve seemingly dropped off the map since February. There’s been the odd sighting, but no further attacks, at least not on wizards. The Ministry likely has no idea if they’ve been going after muggles as well. 

Lydia wonders, often, if that might be somehow easier. She has no one to blame for her powers except genetics. It was just luck of the draw that she was born with them. But werewolves aren’t born, they’re made. They have someone to hate, to revile, someone who hurt them, bit them, scratched them, created the monster under their skin. Lydia doesn’t have a creator. Therese might have raised her, but she didn’t make Lydia into a metamorphmagus, she just made her a good one. 

Yet sometimes it almost feels the same. Like- like something was taken from her. 

Her face burns, for a moment, as she fumbles with the wrought iron knocker. She pushes the thought away. 

To her surprise, Tess answers the door looking slightly flustered, as if she’d just been rushing around. Her hair is slightly askew, and her clothes a little rumpled. 

“What happened?” Lydia asks flatly, taking some sick pleasure in being the one to judge, for once, rather than being scrutinized by her aunt’s cold, piercing, green-eyed stare. 

“Oh, nothing,” Therese says, too breezily, but her face is flushed. “It’s just-,”

There’s a muffled thud from upstairs, as if someone dropped something heavy on the floor, or slammed a door. 

“Valerie isn’t feeling very well,” Tess says, forcibly calm. “So I’ll have the elves bring up her dinner later.”

Lydia arches an eyebrow, priding the way her aunt’s embarrassment and annoyance seeps out of her tall figure. “Oh dear,” she says. “Is she having a fit of temper again? Try to run out on you?”

Her aunt ignores her at first, leading her through the house, then says, “She’s been very out of sorts since she came home from school.”

The Hogwarts term ended just a few days ago; if Valerie Faraday is already this irascible after seventy two hours back with the Notts, Lydia thinks they are in for a rough summer. The thought pleases her and sickens her at the same time. She’s not unfeeling; she doesn’t- but Valerie isn’t her. Valerie isn’t a little girl, she’s fifteen, she’ll be of age in two years. And she certainly doesn’t need to be trained to control herself the way Lydia does. 

Still, Lydia feels even tenser as they step into the sun room. Glass paneled walls reveal the brilliant setting June sun over the gardens behind them, filling the room with a strange, dusky half-light. It’s a beautiful sight, but she’s seen it a thousand times before, a thousand Junes before, and now it just fills her with dread. She checks the thick carpeting for a stain, as always, but of course, the stain left by boiling water could be easily cleaned with a charm.

She can still remember the thick carpeting under her face, the unscalded side, as she lay, weeping, on this floor, twenty years ago. She can still smell her flesh burning. And how her fingers dug into the carpets with claws, and she trembled and convulsed in agony, moaning, unable to even scream, while her aunt stood over her. 

“I didn’t want to do that,” she’d said, voice hoarse. “But you forced my hand. You’ll learn, now. You’ll learn to present a better face to the world, Lydia. That’s all I asked you to do. That’s all I am asking for. And you had to make it so difficult. Stubborn girl.”

“We should eat in the parlor-,” Lydia begins, but their meals are already laid out.

Therese sinks into her chair with a weary sigh, oblivious. 

After a pained moment, Lydia sits as well, unfolding her napkin, shoulders back, forcing a polite expression onto her face. 

“Well,” says Therese, as her wine pours itself, floating gracefully over the pristine white tablecloth. “I hear your husband has been getting some nasty letters from the gypsies.”

Lydia stiffens, then allows, “The Travellers, yes. They’re… quite upset about the latest mandate.”

Tom’s law requiring all magical children born in the United Kingdom to attend Hogwarts- and only Hogwarts- for their schooling went into effect a few weeks ago. It hardly effected most of the population; the Ministry census estimates over 98% of British witches and wizards attend Hogwarts for their schooling. But some, like the Travellers, have always preferred to educate their children at home. 

They’re a very small minority; as far as Tom says. Their muggle numbers are small; their magical numbers minuscule. That said, those hundred are making their voices heard. Tom’s had five separate howlers over the past several weeks, all shrieking at him in Irish or Shelta. Helpfully, though, they have often switched into English for their curses. Tom laughs it off, but Lydia suspects it riles at him, even this brief display of defiance. 

“Someone should have sorted them out years ago,” Therese is saying now, reprovingly. “A disgrace, they are. Making their own wands, like savages! And they have no respect for the Statute of Secrecy, they’re always being brought in on charges…” Her lip curls, “Grabbing for their wands during bar fights, and the like.”

Lydia doesn’t know of any pubs that permit them service, in the first place, but then again, she’s never been in one herself. 

“Their children should be taken too,” her aunt says. “You tell him that. Ridiculous, how they carry on. Teaching made up curses and playing at healing.”

Lydia takes another sip of her wine; it’s very tart. “They’re not the only ones upset,” she says. “Some immigrants prefer to send their children to schools in their home countries, if they’ll allow it. Most of the Indian schools won’t take children born in Britain, but the Polish will, and the Caribbean-,”

Her aunt dismisses her out of hand; she’s downed nearly her whole cup in just a few minutes, Lydia realizes with a start. She’s never known her aunt to drink much, never even seen her tipsy, not like her mother or other aunts at various parties. The girl must have really rattled her; Tess’ cheeks are bright red, lips like cherries. Her beauty irritates Lydia. She looks far younger than she is; no wrinkles, no age spots. What does she look like underneath that? Maybe she’s old and rotting, like a fruit past its prime. Lydia can dream, can’t she?

“No, enough about that,” her aunt says, as Lydia forks more salad into her mouth. “We might as well take the opportunity to discuss the Benson woman.”

Lydia freezes with her fork between her teeth; she bites down hard onto the silver, then removes it. “What is there to discuss?” she asks mildly. “I hope you haven’t been plying my brother for information; you know he’ll say anything for attention.”

After she was burned, Lyle protested, quite loudly, if she recalls. It had startled her, his anger on her behalf. He’d railed at their parents, at Therese herself, at Antony, and been summarily sent to his room without supper. She did not see him for weeks after that, and he never mentioned it again. She’s not sure if she loves or hates him for it. He was weak. He was just a child himself. But he should have protected her. What are brothers for, if not to protect their sisters? He should have taken her away, when he came of age. Gotten them both out. He could have done it. 

Instead he was a coward, like always. 

Like her. 

“I’ve looked over the girl’s files,” Therese continues. “Mae,” her lip curls a little. “What a silly name. I suppose it makes sense; her mother was just a child when she had her.”

“Mae Benson has nothing to do with any of this,” Lydia says tartly.

“Mae Benson has everything to do with this,” her aunt snaps. “If she’s your husband’s bastard daughter.”

“She isn’t,” Lydia shovels more salad into her mouth.

“Stop stuffing yourself like a little pig and listen to me,” Therese hisses, and Lydia does, reddening with humiliation. “She could be. Even if she isn’t, she is still a liability, her and her mother. She could be his child. They have some similarities- the dark hair, the facial structure-,”

“Well, that must prove it, then,” Lydia rolls her eyes, reaching for her wine glass, but her aunt slaps at her wrist, like she might a naughty dog. 

Lydia retreats, wrist stinging. “Don’t hit me,” she even sounds like a little girl, all pouty.

“Don’t interrupt,” Tess says coldly. “She could be. Imagine if some nosy reporter- another Skeeter- got hold of that sort of story. It would ruin him. Not just in government, in life. And your life as well. Merlin, I could throttle him myself, or the silly boy he was. She’s no great beauty, that Benson woman, and I can’t see why he would bother with her in the least.”

“They came out of the same orphanage, for a start,” Lydia says darkly. 

Therese’s expression clears. “Well, that makes a bit more sense. A childhood crush. Looks hardly tie into it. Nor common sense. I suppose she must have prevailed upon him until he decided a quick roll around-,”

“Can you stop that?” Lydia snaps. “Stop talking about it like that, he’s my husband-,”

“He won’t be for much longer if this is allowed to go unchecked!” Her aunt stares at her. “Lydia. Is there any possibility that he still-,”

“That he loves her?” Lydia hesitates for a moment, eyes stinging, then snaps, "He hates her. I think he’d like to kill her. But I think he’d quite like to fuck her first, if that’s what you’re asking. He hates her and he needs her. He still thinks about her. It’s been over a decade and he still thinks about her. I know he does. I can see it in his eyes. Even when he's looking at me. And not just because of the girl. I don’t think he ever stopped thinking about her. He hates her so much I think he never wants it to stop, him hating her and her hating him. So they can go on like that forever. Like- like two vines, all tangled up, choking out the same tree, and each other.”

There is silence for a long moment after that. The sun has sunk down behind the trees outside, the sky darkening from reddish purple to blue. 

“Then she has to be dealt with,” Therese says. 

Lydia stares at her. “You- you mean kill her?”

“Obviously not,” her aunt says tersely. “Don’t be idiotic, Lydia. Murder is not the solution for these sorts of problems. You have to handle it as you would any other addiction. Isolate it. Isolate her. And the child. So it can’t seep over into the rest of your lives.”

“What are you talking about?” Lydia asks, shakily. “What do you mean-,”

“He’ll see sense,” Tess says. “You’ll make him see sense, or I will. Have her dismissed from her position immediately, and removed from MESP. He’s an intelligent man, and Tony can help him. She can’t be allowed any influence, anywhere. Nor any weaselly little friends she could confide in, if she hasn’t already. What if Dumbledore knows? You’d best pray he doesn’t.”

“So what, have her sacked?” Lydia asks incredulously. “How will that solve anything?”

“You want her desperate,” Therese says. “More importantly, he wants her desperate. She has a child to support. And that is where you get her by the throat. The child. Tom can make some agreement with her then. Find some little house for them somewhere far out in the countryside, away from Hogwarts, away from London. Install them there. He can visit when he pleases, do as he pleases. The daughter will continue to attend Hogwarts, and some marriage can be made for her when she’s done. A very quiet one. Or a job, I suppose. Somewhere insignificant. Nowhere near politics or the press.” 

“This is mad,” Lydia says. “Why would she- even if he were to- even if I told him- Benson would never agree to any of that, she’s-,”

“She will,” says her aunt calmly. “Jobless, homeless, she’ll agree to anything. And if she doesn’t, she can be chucked in Azkaban while her daughter finishes out her school years, and then perhaps joins her.”

Lydia feels like she might vomit. “I- that’s ridiculous. He would never agree to that. He loves her.” Saying it feels like a filthy sentence, like jumbled up curse words. 

“He loves her?” Therese laughs, brittle and incredulous at that. “Tom Gaunt doesn’t love anyone, darling. He doesn’t love you, and he doesn’t love her. He does want her, though. Which is more than you can say.”

Lydia feels herself stand up. “I’m leaving. I have to go.”

“Sit back down,” her aunt says. When she refuses, Therese gets to her feet as well. “Lydia! Don’t walk away from me.” Her voice is low and venomous, dripping with warning.

With a wave of her wand, the doors leading back into the house slam shut before Lydia can reach them. Lydia’s not going to tug on them helplessly, though she is trembling violently. She turns back around, feels sweat trickle down her back under her clothes, which suddenly feel far too tight, restraining her.

Her aunt’s eyes are narrowed in displeasure. “You’re acting like a toddler,” she says. “Throwing a fit when you hear something you don’t like. This is all for your sake, Lydia. To protect your interests. He’ll be much easier to handle once this is all settled. And you’ll sleep better at night for it.”

I don’t sleep well at night, Lydia thinks. I never have. 

“Nothing you have ever done,” she says instead, fighting to keep her voice from shaking, “has been for my sake. It’s all been for yours. Your pride. Your ego. Your- your desire to control everything. Everything about me.”

“You’re being dramatic,” Tess says, but her green eyes have widened slightly in genuine surprise. “Lydia. Sit down, this instant, and finish your meal. We have more to talk about.”

“I’m done,” says Lydia. “I’m done, do you hear me? Done discussing anything with you, ever. I don’t want to see you again unless it’s a public event. Don’t involve yourself in my marriage. Don’t invite yourself over to my house. And do not order me about. I am not your daughter. And I am not a child.”

“You’re a fool,” Tess snaps. “A fool, and I wish I could have done better by you, I wish you’d been more sensible-,”

“Maybe you burned all the sense out of me!” Lydia yells. 

Therese draws back as if slapped. “Stop it.” For the first time the anger has left her entirely, replaced by something close to discomfort. 

“No,” says Lydia, taking a step forward. “No. I was a child. A little girl. And you- you splashed boiling water down my face. Why? Because I wouldn’t listen? Because I was rude? Defiant? You- you are sick. You are sick, and you act as if I’m the one who’s unstable!”

“You’re unruly,” Tess says hoarsely. “You’ve always been unruly, and you had to learn. No one else was willing to do it. Everything you have now, I gave you.”

“No,” Lydia snarls. “No.”

She takes another step closer. 

“Stay away,” Therese suddenly seems alarmed. “Lydia, your- get yourself under control, stay away-,” She actually backs away, knocking against the table. 

Lydia stops; her ears are pounding and ringing, but inside she feels strangely calm. “Coward,” she says, and feels her lips curl back in an unsightly, almost relieved smile. “You’ve always been a coward."

She turns back around, then some instinct causes her to flinch downwards. Her aunt’s ‘Imperio!’ misses her by inches. 

She turns back around. Tess’s eyes are the color of a bruise, purpling in rage. 

“If I have to teach you again-,”

Lydia sighs, almost reflexively, like a gasp for air. Her eyes are watering, but she isn't crying. She feels something settle, like a muscle or joint slipping back into place.

“Then I’ll never learn,” she finishes the sentence. And changes. 

VALERIE

She’s rereading a letter from Mae and trying to ignore the livid pain in her face, from where Mrs. Nott struck her, when she hears it. A great crashing sound, like a chandelier had just fallen, or a china cabinet come tumbling down. Valerie has been living with the Notts for a year now - though it’s less than a year when you factor in the time she’s spent at school, she reminds herself hastily. If you only count the holidays, it’s only been several months. That has to mean something. It hasn’t been so long. 

Anyways, she knows the house well enough by now, though they keep plenty of rooms locked up so she can’t go in them, like it’s some kind of museum. And it is not a loud house. That’s what Valerie hates about it the most. More than the stuffy air and the old furniture and the ridiculous clothes they make her wear. More than Mr. and Mrs. Nott themselves, who she can’t even bring herself to hate with a passion- they’re not passionate people- only loathe with a simmering resentment. What she hates most is the silence. It’s quiet. Not just at night, but always. 

Her family’s small house in Exeter was- is- the exact opposite. Her parents aren’t what she’d call loud, obnoxious people- though the Notts think anyone who’s poor is obnoxious, that’s why they hate them so much, the uncouth lower classes, breeding too quickly and stinking up the streets. But any household with three daughters close in age and not enough space is going to be rowdy, and that’s what her was- is. 

Valerie used to hate it; Carol and Sheila, her younger sisters, have always been like two peas in a pod, ganging up on her, pulling faces and teasing and calling her names. They all had to share a bedroom together, and when she was little, Sheila was still in a crib and she and Carrie had to share the bed. And Carrie kicks in her sleep. And drools. She wasn’t like them, her sister, didn’t like playing with dolls or dressing up like ballerinas or princesses, always wanted to go out and roughhouse with the boys or be left alone to dig in the garden, looking for buried treasure. 

It wasn’t any easier, what with her magic; once she accidentally turned Carrie’s hair neon green. It took weeks to wash out. Or the time she made the dinner table collapse when Sheila grabbed the last biscuit from the platter her mother was passing around. Valerie thinks her sisters always viewed her with thinly veiled suspicion after that, sure there was something off, freaky, about her, but they just couldn’t prove it. 

But they were- they are still her sisters, and they love each other, even if she can’t stand them. And she misses them. And her parents. She misses her parents the most; she’s worried she’s beginning to forget the sound of their voices, if not their faces. She has a few family photos she brought to Hogwarts with her, but that’s it. She didn’t even get to say goodbye. Have they really been memory charmed, or do they just think she’s dead? What did the Ministry tell them? Are they alright? Once she had a nightmare that she made her way back home, only to find them gone, her old house shuttered and empty, as if the Faraday family had never existed in the first place.

But all that to say- Valerie’s not one for moping about, not really, her parents raised her to be practical and self-sufficient- a crash like that wouldn’t be unheard of at home. But here? She sets down the letter and approaches her locked bedroom door, pressing her ear up against it, straining to hear through the heavy wood. Distantly, from the first floor, she can hear scampering sounds, like running feet, the tinkling of broken glass, the crunching of wood. A scream, then. 

Valerie jumps back from the door, no longer confused but alarmed. She couldn’t give a damn what happens to the Notts- she might not want them dead but she wouldn’t shed any tears if they keeled over, let’s put it that way- but she’s locked in this room without her wand, and if someone’s broken in and robbing them, or something like that, then she’s pretty well helpless, isn’t she? 

She backs away from the door further, wishing the floorboards didn’t creak so under her bare feet. As soon as Mrs. Nott locked her in here, she stripped out of her stupid old-fashioned clothes and put on a smuggled pair of jeans and a blouse. But she still feels vulnerable without anything to defend herself with. They took everything out of her room that she could throw at someone, or break, besides the very heavy furniture which she can’t hope to lift on her own. 

Another scream from downstairs. It doesn’t just sound fearful, it sounds terrified. 

Valerie chews on her lower lip, winces as her bruised cheek throbs again, then says, in a voice barely above a whisper, “Lottie.”

The Notts have a total of five house elves, but Lottie is the nicest. None of them are cruel, exactly, the elves, but as a rule they’re very loyal- or just too frightened- of Mrs. Nott to dare disobey, and that includes speaking to Valerie. Valerie has tried to talk Lottie into helping her run away before, but while Lottie is always kind to her, she wouldn’t hear of it. 

“Miss Valerie is much better off here, she is, where she is safe,” Lottie would exclaim, and no matter how much Valerie argued, that would be that.

“Lottie,” she says, again, into the air. There is no response. Valerie still doesn’t know much about elves, but she knows they can do loads of things without wands- they don’t apparate, like wizards and witches, they just… appear, silently, and they can turn themselves invisible without a cloak or spell. They’re powerful, too- Valerie doesn’t know why they have to obey wizards and witches, only that there’s some stupid laws about it. It sounds a lot like slavery, to her, and last she checked that was banned in 1833. 

Then again, wizards like not giving a damn about muggle laws. Just like how they don’t give a damn about muggles themselves. 

“Lottie!” her voice rises a little in fear, as there’s more crashing sounds from downstairs, but there’s still no response. Either the elves are hurt, hiding, or they’ve gone to get help. 

Valerie paces around the room, hands wedged in her armpits, thinking. She can’t just sit here. She glances towards the windows- they’re all sealed shut with magic, she can only open them a few inches, not nearly far enough to slip out. She can’t break the glass, either. And there’s no other way out of this room. Except the locked door. 

Making up her mind, she rushes back over to the bed, rummaging under it for her slippers while snatching up Mae’s last letter. They’ve only been able to exchange a few, and that’s because of Minister Gaunt, she’s pretty sure. He knows Mae. Valerie’s not sure how, though she has her theories, and she doesn’t know why he would care whether she and Mae can write, but her and Mae both assume all their letters are being read, anyways, so they talk in a code.

Not an obvious code, like a cipher, but with coded language. 

Valerie reads the letter once more, focused on the words written in slightly darker ink, and murmuring to herself, “Bend, lever, feel, pin- bend, lever, feel, pin-,” she wrenches open her top nightstand drawer, grabs a handful of loose bobby pins, and selects one. She’s never actually done this before- she’s been too nervous to practice, in case she got caught trying it, and they took all her bobby pins away. 

But there’s no trial like a trial by fire, right?

There’s no more screaming from downstairs. She’s not sure if that’s a good thing or not. 

Valerie inserts the pin into the lock, hands shaking until she forces herself to breathe in and out, in and out, and then bend the pin to create a lever, and starts feeling for the internal pins of the door lock itself. “Push up,” she mutters to herself, “alright, push up, next one-,”

She holds her breath until she hears it click open. Valerie is stunned that even worked; she stands there dumbly for a moment, then steels herself. She has to get into Mr. Nott’s study, and get her wand back. Slowly, carefully, she creaks open the heavy door, and dashes down the hall, the thick carpeting muffling her frantic footfall. The next lock takes longer, and an oily portrait glaring down at her begins to curse and swear, calling her a mudblood, but no one comes upstairs, to her relief, and her ears are now ringing so badly she can’t even hear what’s happening downstairs. 

Valerie rushes into the darkened study, shuts the door behind her, and turns on a gas lamp, looking around frantically before she spots her wand- it’s lying right out in the open, on Mr. Nott’s desk. She can’t believe they’d be so careless. Then she realizes, with a flush of shame, that they never thought she’d get in here in the first place. They thought she was too frightened, that she'd finally given up. But she hasn’t had the opportunity- or the real, life-threatening need- until now. 

She doesn’t stand around to reflect on her luck. Valerie snatches up her wand, internally rejoicing as it emits a shower of green sparks in delight, pleased to be reunited with her. She moves towards the window; if she can climb out, she can skid down the sloped roof, then hop onto a wall, then climb down from there- then hesitates. 

What else are they keeping in here? 

Making yet another hasty decision- it’s not like she can do much else- she opens all the desk drawers that aren’t locked, or that will open with a simple Alohomora, pulls out as many crumpled letters as she can, and shoves them into her pockets. They’ll be all crumpled up, but it’s better than nothing. She’ll look at them later, see if it’s anything useful, anything incriminating, that she could use as ammunition. Mr. Nott is a Knight of Walpurgis, she knows that much just from eavesdropping. And she’s willing to bet they’re not a very pleasant bunch, whatever crowd he and the Minister associate with. 

If they legally took her away from her family, God knows what they’re doing illegally, right? 

Pleased with her nerve, she flings open the window, then stops, in horror, staring out across the darkened lawn. 

Distantly, from the faint glow of light emanating from the sun room and veranda, she can see one figure crumpled onto the ground, and another loping towards the trees. Not running, like a person, but like an animal. Valerie stares after them in shock, then hears a distant shriek from downstairs, that of one of the house elves, she’s sure of it. 

She shoves her wand in her back pocket, scrambles out the narrow window, and inches down the slate tiled roof like a crab, using her hands and feet, praying she doesn’t slip, fall, and break her neck. She manages to hop down onto the width of the wall, balancing perilously like a cat, then scrambles down, using the ancient protruding stones and bricks as holds. She lands on her feet in the wet, dewy grass, then takes a moment to decide what she’s going to do next as she struggles to catch her breath. 

Wafting on the wind, she hears a distant moan of pain. 

Every instinct in Valerie screams for her to run, now, and head for the nearest road. If she can get off the grounds without being caught, find somewhere to hide out for the night- in the hedgerows, if she has to- then the moan, again. She has to know. 

Cursing under her breath, she follows the wall in that direction until it ends, then skirts across the gardens until the veranda and brightly lit sunroom are within sight. 

She stops, still in the shadows, to see who it is that hurt. 

It’s Mrs. Nott. 

Valerie stays where she is, paralyzed with terror for a moment. The woman is lying on the ground, her head tilted to the side, clothes torn and chest raked open by powerful gouges and scratches, as if from a wild beast- from a wolf. She’s bleeding out into the grass, and as Valerie watches, her foster mother- changes- somehow, as if… as if the life were leeched from her. Her coppery hair dulls to a dark brown, her green eyes seem darker, smaller, and her face is spotted, blemished with age and sun. Her skin wrinkles, and she seems smaller, somehow, frailer, not an intimidatingly beautiful woman. 

Valerie is still staring at her when she realizes she’s dead. She’s dead. She’s not breathing, just staring, glassily, horribly, at Valerie, accusatorily-

“MISTRESS NOTT!” a voice wails, and Valerie bolts.

Runs like she’s never run before, ducking and weaving, vanishing amidst the shrubbery, wand in hand. She keeps running until the great house has faded into the distance behind her, and her breath comes hard and ragged. Her bruise throbs again. Now she’s at one of the many burbling streams dotting the property. She has no real sense of direction here, she's not allowed out of the house much without supervision, but if she follows it, keeping the house at her back, she’ll come to one of the ornamental lakes, and beyond that, a road. 

As far as she can tell, no one is pursuing her. But if the elves have raised an alarm, if Mr. Nott is on his way home- that terrifying thought alone makes Valerie begin to run again, despite the knot in her ribs and the ache in her calves. 

She doesn’t have the slightest clue where she’s going, but anywhere has to be better than here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. Lydia and her aunt are referring to Irish Travellers protesting a law mandating all magical children having to attend Hogwarts. Travellers are a distinct ethnic group that is indigenous to Ireland and have been recognized as such since 2017. Travellers speak English but many also speak Shelta, which is a language originating from a mixture of Irish, English, and Romani. In this fic, they face significant discrimination even among the magical community, with many deriding them for choosing to craft their own wands and keeping their children out of Hogwarts. 
> 
> 2\. Lyle has pretty much been a functioning (or not) alcoholic since his teenaged years. This was in part brought on over feelings of guilt and depression regarding the abuse and mistreatment his sister faced, as well as his own emotional abuse levied at him by his parents when he tried to stick up for. Lydia holds some resentment towards him for not kidnapping and running away with her once he was of age, but obviously Lyle is not responsible for what happened to her, and was still a child himself while it was going on. 
> 
> 3\. As we see in this chapter, Tom and Therese actually have quite a bit in common, in regards to how they think. Both have inextricably conflated control and abuse with love, and both claim to want what is best for the people they love while simultaneously hurting and threatening and manipulating them. Lydia comes to this revelation this chapter, that her childhood being raised by her aunt really primed her perfectly for her dysfunctional marriage, only Tom at least doesn't even claim to love her. 
> 
> 4\. I think a lot of this chapter speaks for itself, so I won't dwell on it too much. Next chapter will be an Amy POV taking place shortly before the start of the term. Mae's last few years at Hogwarts are going to be a wild ride. Also, happy early Valentine's Day!


	48. Amy XXI

HOGWARTS, AUGUST 1961

Amy is still listening to the late evening news hour on the radio when the message comes in from a nondescript school owl. She examines it tiredly in the dim light of her bedroom, then sends it off without a reply, burning the scrap of paper. Though word came through the grape vine of a potential meeting of the Order weeks ago, Dumbledore has taken to not explicitly confirming anything until right before the hour, to be as cautious as possible, even when they are meeting behind Hogwarts walls.

Now that she knows she no longer has to fear June spying on them- or does she?- Amy should feel as though some sort of weight has been lifted, but it’s difficult, even just listening to the news. She likes this station the best because it does a combination of magical and muggle events, though it’s rarely uplifting.. Because often it seems that both the magical and muggle world are spiraling at the same time.

They’re building a wall of barbed wire in Berlin to divide East Germany from West, and they’re going to shoot anyone who tries to cross it. The Russians have another man in space, orbiting the planet. The Queen is visiting Northern Ireland. Khrushchev is bragging about nuclear weapons. Eichmann’s trial is finally adjourning in Israel; he’ll hang, and good riddance. Nine people are dead in Italy after some children innocently dug up an exploded howitzer shell.

She switches it off, perturbed. She is trying to remember what it was like when she was Mae’s age, fifteen now, in 1942. A war was raging. A genocide was occurring. People were dying and dying and dying and it never seemed to end, there was a new atrocity in the papers every morning. There was rationing and bombing and they handed out gas masks to children. 

But in 1942 she was a prefect, she was still sheltered, in her way, safe for most of the year here at school, skipping around the castle, following Tom into dark nooks and crannies, giddy with affection, squeezing his hand under the table during Potions, casting doe-eyed looks his way after quidditch matches. She still had some hope, some thought that once the war was over- once both wars were over, there would be peace and plenty and everyone would be happy and humanity wouldn’t seem quite so wretched and hateful. 

And now she doesn’t know if any of these girlish hopes ever came true, or if she just convinced herself they had, because she had to believe that things were better than they had been. Maybe in some ways they are. Mae is growing up into a new kind of woman, things are different now, freer, the older generations are dying out, and they always talk about how the youth- these kids, Mae’s generation, how someday they are going to rule the world, and it will be a world that is rich and carefree and artistic, a world that indulges in luxuries and temptations that Amy’s generation never had. 

She wishes that will be true, too. But she’s just not convinced of it. 

She stands up, sighing, glad she hadn’t changed into her pyjamas yet, despite the late hour. Despite being the middle of summer, it’s cool and misty outside, the stars and moon veiled behind clouds. She steps down the shadowed hall towards Mae’s room; she’s playing some Sinatra album, which is a lot more tolerable than some of the crap she listens to. Amy supposes this makes her properly old, that she no longer understands music or what is popular with teenagers. 

Mae’s been growing her hair out again; but at night she still wears a headband, though she now refuses to so much as touch one during the day, convinced they’re ‘juvenile’. Tom seemed perturbed by it when he last saw her; he dropped by for a ‘brief visit’ around her birthday in March, one weekend. Amy stood like a statue in the kitchen, refusing to move or even acknowledge his presence in their home, while he sat on one end of the faded sofa and Mae sat on the other, silently opening her birthday gifts. It would have been almost comic to an outside observer. 

He’d gotten that same almost eager, wistful look on his cruel face, watching their daughter, though Mae kept an admirably neutral expression as she flipped through glossy books fresh off displays in Flourish and Blotts, tickets to theater shows booked months in advance, and unwrapped modest, teenage-appropriate jewelry; new earrings, a bloodstone pendant necklace for her March birthday, a pair of white gloves, the kind elegant young ladies might still be coaxed into wearing out in public, though it’s becoming more and more old-fashioned to do so. 

“Thank you,” Mae had said, or some variation of that, in response to her gifts. She’d already opened her presents from Amy the night before; she wanted new records in glossy covers and workbooks to practice her trigonometry. 

Amy has never pressured her to keep up a side-schedule of muggle math and sciences (some of the math is covered in Transfiguration, anyways), but Mae likes to challenge herself. Maybe it would be better, Amy thinks, if she had been born a muggle. More and more girls go to universities now. They have better scholarships, more opportunities, even if they aren't from wealthy families. Mae would have worked hard in school; she could become a doctor, or a chemist, or an engineer- not the options that were presented as ‘respectable professions’ to Amy when she was a girl: nurse, teacher, secretary. 

“You do like them, don’t you?” 

And how Amy had wanted to silently sneer at him then, but as if he’d felt her contemptuous stare, Tom had glanced back at her, his faux-warm smile flickering, and she’d looked away, determined to see him gone, and not to pick a fight in the process. 

“Yes,” Mae had said, not very convincingly. “Yes, it’s all- it’s all very nice. Thank you.” 

She does that now, Amy has realized, slips into a disturbingly almost adult-like voice, like a hint of the young woman to come. But she’s still just a child. Fifteen is still a little girl. Yet Amy finds herself missing Mae’s tantrums and tempers. She’s still snide and rude and self-absorbed quite often, but- to hear her talk like that, to hear her put on a front of civility- that had been unnervingly adult-like. 

If you tell her to put on that necklace you got her, Amy had thought, if you tell her to put on that necklace so you can see how it looks on her, I will scratch your goddamn eyes out. 

And he hadn’t. 

“Mae,” she says, rapping lightly on her daughter’s half-open door. “I have to pop up to the school for a meeting.”

“Okay,” she doesn’t look up; she’s lying on her bed, her dark hair obscuring her face, her cat on her chest. 

“Go to bed soon, alright? I’ll lock up.”

“Okay.”

Why bother, she can hear Mae say in her head. Who are you trying to keep out? He can come over whenever he likes, clearly. You’re pathetic. What kind of mother lets a monster so close to her child? You let him see me. Speak to me. Give me gifts. And you just stand there, watching, glaring. And you don’t say a word. You don’t fight him. You don’t order him out. You just stand there. 

She can justify it to herself; she’s used to that by now. Attacking Tom isn’t going to help her or Mae. She doesn’t have the element of surprise in the least anymore, and she has nothing to threaten him with. And as painful as it is for her to watch them interact, isn’t it better that at least this way, he has some incentive to behave himself, because she isn’t throwing things and screaming at him? He hasn’t hurt Mae. He hasn’t even laid a hand on Mae. He doesn’t try to embrace Mae or kiss her cheek or pretend that they are a normal father and daughter. 

He doesn’t tell her disturbing things or threaten to harm her friends. He just… comes by every several months, give her gifts, asks about her schooling, what she’s learning, what she likes to do for fun. When Mae isn’t in the mood to be tolerant, he ignores her snappish retorts, doesn’t rise to the bait if she mutters things under her breath or refuses to speak with him. 

Once Mae ran upstairs and locked herself in her room, and Amy had felt her heart hammering in her chest, every instinct screaming to throw herself in front of the stairs, to block the way if he tried to storm up after Mae, if he tried to hurt her, punish her for defying him. 

But Tom had just sat there, and looked at Amy, standing there, rigidly, in the kitchen, gaze darting in panic between the upstairs and him, and smiled some vaguely smug, appeasing little smile, as if to say, ‘No need for alarm, I’m reformed now, I can be patient. I can be patient now, Amy, I can wait. See how generous I am? How understanding? What more could you ask for?’ 

She leaves the house before she says anything foolish, before she offers some weak-minded apology. Mae only has three years left of school. After that- well, Amy doesn’t know what happens after that, but Tom is not- cannot- be a problem after that. Because she did not bring Mae back here just to have to run with her again. She won’t do that. She won’t subject her daughter to that. 

The walk up to the school is good for clearing her head, at least, though she keeps a watchful eye out. Tom is not the only threat out there; far from it. She relaxes a little once she’s on school grounds, and continues the walk up to the silent, darkened castle. They’re meeting in Dumbledore’s office; while not nearly as large as the headmaster’s office, it’s still big enough to comfortably seat a dozen or so people, and it’s so heavily warded that Amy doubts even Tom himself could break into it without raising a fuss. 

She doesn’t expect everyone to be there; the Order rarely meets with all members present, few though they are right now. But she is surprised by who is there. Sidney and Iris are givens, as are Amell, Witherspoon, and even Slughorn is back, since he’s due to start next month. Amy won’t pretend to be pleased at losing half her classes to him, but she can admit it will be a weight off her shoulders in terms of work load, to not have to deal with the upper years’ curriculum. 

But June and Arthur are there as well, sitting in chairs against the wall, both stone-faced and grim. 

Amy didn’t have to do much hard negotiating with June, back in December. It was more a case of ‘you tell Dumbledore the truth, or I will’. She supposes June could have tried to threaten her into silence, but she seemed to sense the jig was up. And it just seems more sensible to Amy, at least. What is the point of having two separate plots to take down the same person? Even if Tuft is unwilling to work directly with Dumbledore, even if they have different ideas about what exactly Tom’s fate should be, surely she realizes Dumbledore is not an enemy, and that they’re all better off sharing information between them. 

Amy sits down beside Iris; Sid shoots her a concerned glance, then a small smile. Iris squeezes her hand, jerking her head over at Arthur and June.

“Something to comment on, Iris?” June asks sharply.

“Get off your high horse,” Iris replies easily, “Did you honestly think you were just going to walk in here and sit down and not get any odd looks, June? We spent years thinking you were a bloody traitor, for God’s sake.”

Arthur stiffens, but says nothing.

“Who’s watching Sean?” Sidney asks innocently, as if to lighten the mood. 

“Orla,” June says. 

There’s some confused stares.

Witherspoon smiles thinly. “She means her cat.”

“My familiar,” June crosses and uncross her slender legs; somehow she still manages to look elegant at this time of muggy night. 

“Now you sound like Mae,” Amy mutters, then regrets it, as multiple glances dart in her direction.

Dumbledore clears his throat; he’s not sitting behind his desk, but beside it, as if to lesson the impression that they are all a bunch of troubled students, rather than his colleagues.

“Well,” he says, “before we begin, would anyone look any refreshments? There’s Earl Grey and shortbread.”

Slughorn quite eagerly partakes; no one else is in the mood for a midnight snack. 

When Horace realizes Dumbledore is waiting for him to finish nibbling to speak, he dusts some crumbs off his emerald green bowtie, and says after a fortifying sip of tea, “Yes, well, as you all know, I have finally been… redeemed enough to rejoin the ranks of the Knights. And to take my place as a professor here once more. Nott finally approved it, before the… unfortunate business with his wife.”

Amy winces reflexively; she might not have liked Therese Nott in the least, but she doesn’t think the woman deserved to die like that. The Ministry is quite boldly claiming it was werewolves, despite the lack of a full moon that night, but no one is buying it. On the other hand, the Daily Prophet has quite abruptly stopped questioning anything the government says in regards to mysterious deaths or disappearances. 

Lucinda Amell is studying the carpeting, head bowed slightly. 

Slughorn continues, in a forcibly bright tone, “We- that is, Albus and I have reason to believe that with my… return to the teaching staff, Tom may be planning something of a… purging of school officials. Coinciding with his continued ‘reclamation’ of muggleborn children from their parents, and the new law mandating attendance.”

“Lay-offs,” Sidney says. “Well, gee, who could have seen that coming? Not exactly a union man, is he, Gaunt?”

Iris laughs bitterly at that.

Even Dumbledore offers a faint, grim smile behind his beard, which is nearly completely white, not the grey it mostly was just several years ago. Amy supposes stress ages even men as powerful as him. Funny how it hasn’t seemed to touch Tom. He barely looks as if he’s aged at all within the past few years, unlike past Ministers, bent by the weight of stress and anxiety of their leadership. Maybe it’s all the blatant corruption and murder keeping him young. 

“Fortunately,” Dumbledore says, “we are prepared to fight back. Iris Greengrass has been put into contact with Gregory Pike, and he is- shall we say- open to the idea of considering a case against the current government, so long as hard proof can be provided.”

Startled looks are exchanged at that.

Dumbledore inclines his head to Amy. “Matthew Abbott has proved quite valuable in that regard. Pike is wary, but prepared to do what is right, regardless of the consequences.”

Arthur Norbrook huffs but says nothing.

“And thanks to Irene and June,” Dumbledore says, “we find ourselves in possession of some damning evidence.”

Amy stares at June, who shrugs, and says, lightly, “Irene and I go way back. Housemates, you know? And honestly,” she yawns, as if it’s nothing to fuss over, “Therese Nott's murder was the best thing that could have happened for us.”

Witherspoon’s look is scorching.

“Oh, spare me the affront,” June says. “It gave her ward- the child whose kidnapping her and her husband all but orchestrated, might I add- a chance to escape. Which she did. With some very valuable papers.”

Amy tenses. “Valerie Faraday? Where is she?” She had no idea Valerie had run away in the first place. There was no mention of her disappearance in the papers, unsurprisingly. 

“Is she alright?” Sidney presses, glancing at Dumbledore. “She’s just a kid.”

“Valerie is, for the time being, safe,” Dumbledore says gravely. “She showed a great deal of courage and resourcefulness in putting herself into contact with Eileen Prince, and through her, reached out to June, who Eileen assured her would not turn her in to the Ministry.”

“But where is she now?” Amy snaps. Valerie is only Mae’s age. Eileen is a grown woman now, like it not, and can do as she likes and live where she pleases, with who she pleases. Valerie is a child. 

“Well,” says June, “I was going to ask if your family might be able to put her up in Penzance, Iris.”

Iris seems shocked at the suggestion, though not opposed. “With my mother and sister?”

“Why not?” Arthur cuts in. “They’re out of the way and isolated. She’ll be as safe there as she would be anywhere else, and we professors can check up on her without it looking suspicious.”

Iris frowns, pale brow creased, then nods decisively, blonde poodle curls bouncing around her face. “Alright. I’ll let them know to expect a squib cousin visiting from Exter.” Her lips curls into a slight smile.

“That aside,” Dumbledore continues, “While Tom has been obsessive about making sure his followers have no incriminating documents or items that could be linked back to him, he has, at least in the case of the Notts, neglected to ensure that they have destroyed all… financial records that could be used against him as well.”

“What are you saying?” Amy demands.

“He’s saying,” June smirks, “that Tom’s been dipping into Ministry funds as payouts and hush money for more than a few of the Sacred 28. Arthur or I could have told you that; we’ve heard the deals negotiated. But since Pike doesn’t want to mess with memories, and wants hard physical proof…” She spreads her hands wide in the air like wings. “The truth will set you free. The Notts kept their receipts. A lot of them.”

Amy almost can’t believe he’d be that bloody stupid, piggish, or ignorant. How could he not have- Why in Merlin’s name would he-

“So you’re telling me,” Kalliope cuts in incredulously, “That after all this time, all this spying and back and forth and lies and dodging about- what we’re actually going to get him on- is fraud? Misappropriation of government funds? White collar crime?”

Slughorn actually chuckles. “Well. Yes, it would seem.”

“Isn’t that how they got Al Capone?” Sidney muses. 

“That was tax evasion,” Iris corrects absently. “Marjorie loves muggle crime stories.”

“Morgana’s teats,” Lucinda mutters under her breath. “Perfect. This makes perfect sense, actually-,”

“It does,” Amy says, and suddenly wants to laugh. It is so petty. So ridiculous. “You know, it really does. He always had sticky fingers.”

“They could still drag it out in court,” Witherspoon says, frowning. “If he ties it up in a lengthy legal battle, he could still be in office for years, biding his time…”

“That may not be the only evidence of wrongdoing we have,” Dumbledore says, folding his hands together in front of his dark blue robes. Despite the lines of his face and his great beard, his hands look like those of a man years younger, Amy has always noticed, devoid of unseemly wrinkles or spots of age. 

It’s both reassuring and disturbing at the same time. She’s always thought the same of his eyes. Tom used to agree. He was already an old man when he first came to them, but he had the keen blue eyes of a man decades younger, piercing and cold. 

“Auror Abbott believes the werewolves plaguing the countryside might be an unexpected ally against Tom Gaunt,” Dumbledore continues, ignoring the incredulous stares directed at him. “He has reason to believe- as does Gregory Pike- that the wolves may have… serious grievances with the Knights of Walpurgis.”

“What, the Knights are running around turning people into lycanthropes now?” Amy scoffs. 

Dumbledore says nothing, just levels an even stare at June and Arthur, who both shift in their seats, exchanging an unreadable glance between them. 

“I don’t know anything about it, don’t look me,” June finally says, though she sounds slightly defensive. 

Whatever the truth is, Dumbledore seems unwilling to press it at the moment. 

“That said, reaching out to these werewolves will be a perilous undertaking, though it’s my understanding that the eminent Wilhelmina Tuft is attempting to, shall we say, approach some negotiations of her own with several escaped prisoners from Azkaban.”

It is very obvious that whatever Dumbledore is referring to, June and Arthur didn’t know that he’d found out; they both look taken aback, wary. 

“Which prisoners?” Amy asks, leaning forward slightly in her seat, mind racing to Jaime. 

Dumbledore just raises a bristling eyebrow.

“Isola, Gaunt, and Mulciber,” Arthur lists off in a forcibly calm tone. 

“Jesus Christ,” Sid mutters. “Three mass murderers, excellent, great work-,”

“I thought Isola was only wanted for the one murder,” Iris ponders.

Amy decides now is probably not the time to go into her personal ties to Jaime Isola, or the truth about Morfin Gaunt. Maybe he’ll do them all a favor and finish Tom off himself. He’s certainly had years and years to brood on his own nephew’s betrayal. But then there’s Mulciber. She doesn’t like the idea of him being on the run, though he wouldn’t dare try anything too public with the Ministry breathing down his neck, tearing the country apart searching for him.

“When did they escape?” Lucinda Amell asks, frowning.

“Middle of April,” June allows. “It’s been… quite the gag order by the Ministry, to keep the Prophet from breathlessly reporting on it. Pay-outs left and right to the editors, I assume.”

“Journalistic integrity marches on,” Slughorn snorts. 

“So our options for getting people to testify against him are… murderous werewolves, murderous convicts,” Sid says. “Brilliant. Who’s less likely to bite the hand that feeds them?”

“Matthew is prepared to approach the pack,” Dumbledore says. “I can’t speak to Madam Tuft’s plans.”

Again he levels a look at June and Arthur, but they refuse to so much as blink. 

“She knows what she’s doing,” Arthur says. “And she’s got more experience dealing with Tom Gaunt’s ilk than most of you, no offence.”

“None taken,” Amy retorts. 

“I wish I could tell you all that this would be resolved by the time term starts,” Dumbledore says gravely. “But alas, these things, as always, take time-,”

“Time you won’t have if he catches onto any of this,” June cuts in. “Pike needs to back off. He’s going to get Gaunt’s hackles up. He’s not subtle.”

“You underestimate him, June,” Dumbledore says mildly. “Pike will not announce any sort of investigation until he has all the pieces on the board. A true Slytherin, in that sense.”

“Yeah, well, plans have a tendency to go to shit the longer you sit on them,” June snaps. 

Arthur lays a hand on her arm; she seems genuinely irate, not just peeved. “What we’re trying to say,” he says, in a more mild voice, “is that while we certainly appreciate your efforts, and your connections, Wilhelmina Tuft is better suited to handling this sort of political-,”

“What you’re saying is she’s going to pay a bunch of people off with her own bribes, someone’s going to cook up some additional 'evidence', whatever you need to take him out, is that?” Iris asks, not quite mocking but close. 

“We can quibble over the roads taken when he’s out of the picture,” June says coldly. 

“As in… imprisoned?” Sidney presses. “Like Grindelwald?” He glances at Dumbledore, who keeps a straight face, despite this. “Or…”

Amy suddenly feels sick. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. What can she say? How can she- You should have done it yourself, she thinks. Years ago. He was at your mercy. You could have ended it there. It would have been kinder. For everyone.

But something in her rebels at the thought, all the same. He was just a boy. He was- if she had known then, what she knew now- but she didn’t. That’s the point. She didn’t. She couldn’t have done that, then. Killed someone in cold blood. Not- not before she left. Not like that. 

Now? 

The meeting has dissolved into bickering, which only peters out when Fawkes screeches in his sleep from his gilded perch besides Dumbledore’s mahogany desk. 

“For now,” says Dumbledore, “I advise we all keep our heads down for a little while longer. When I have more information from Pike or others, you’ll be the first to know.”

No one seems thrilled, but at least they know more coming out of this than they did going on. Amy won’t let herself get hopeful again, though. She had hope the last time, too, when Skeeter was supposed to write a crippling expose and Irene was going to get her moment to shine in court. And that went, quite literally, up in flames. 

If Tom even suspects, any of this, if he- she doesn’t know Gregory Pike, but Matthew, Jaime, they are people she cares about. As are most of the people here, now, bidding one another goodnight, putting on their coats. They could all wake up sacked tomorrow, forbidden from entering school grounds. And then where will she be? Dumbledore’s been the only faint protection she’s had so far against Tom, and even that only goes so far. 

There’s the ring, of course, but- well, he thinks he’s had the real thing back in his possession for years now. When he finds out it’s fake, he might not want to bother going through the whole song and dance of teasing its location from her. He might just start killing people until she tells him the truth. 

Sidney is saying something about a drink- sometimes she does want to just shake him, because he has no idea what it’s like to be a parent, doesn’t understand that just because Mae is fifteen now doesn’t mean Amy is comfortable slipping off to some grubby pub for a midnight refresher while her daughter is alone in the house- but then Dumbledore is calling her back, like a student who forgot their homework. 

The door shuts behind the others, and Amy stands there, looking at him steadily. “Yes?” she finally asks.

“I believe I owe you an apology,” he says. “I… have made promises I have not quite been able to keep.”

She scowls; she’s no longer afraid of showing her annoyance in front of him, but there’s an odd sense of guilt at the look in those blue eyes all the same. Amy takes a step forward; the office seems larger and colder without all those warm bodies in it. “In what sense?”

“In the sense that I led you to believe, when you accepted this position here,” Dumbledore says, “that… Tom would be shortly thereafter… handled. I was foolhardy, and arrogant, as I have often been. I underestimated his popularity, his cunning. And I overestimated my own control over things. My influence with the Wizengamot. The state of the Board of Governors.”

“You can only do so much,” Amy exhales. “I mean- sir. Albus. You’re not Headmaster, you’re not some Ministry chief, you’re… just another teacher here.”

“Still,” he says. “I… will admit my name has carried a certain weight, since… the events of '45.”

“When you defeated Grindelwald.”

He inclines his head.

Amy steps closer to the desk; she doesn’t feel like sitting down again, but she feels almost sorry for him, in a way. “You knew him,” she says. “Grindelwald. People… whisper about it sometimes, that the two of you were… friends, once. That you were-,”

“I loved him,” Dumbledore says, and for a moment he does not sound like a grave or bitter old man, but a boy, really. Just a boy. Angry and heartbroken and… confused, as if he is still struggling to reconcile that matter. “I… will not bore you with the details, but when I met- when I met Gellert, I was young, and angry, and convinced, above all, of my own wild ambitions. I was angry with my family, which was not a happy one, with my schooling, which I felt was quaint and rustic compared to the larger magical world, and with myself. As arrogant as I was, I was… insecure. And self-loathing. And desperate for any sort of validation and affection.”

“So he… took you in,” Amy says, carefully.

Dumbledore shakes his head. “We took one another in. I can make no claims of manipulation or conniving on Gellert there. We were the same age, both fresh out of schooling, both bold and reckless, feeding endlessly off one another’s egos and energy. He was an orphan. The last of a once great line of wizards. I had my siblings, but I had no patience or affection for them. I resented them, the responsibility I owed to them. Gellert and I clung to one another instead. We had the run of Europe. We traveled and explored, we wasted our money on foolish amusements, we stayed up for days at a time talking, theorizing, philosophizing…”

“Convinced, like many intelligent, pigheaded young men, that our ideas were unique, groundbreaking. I will not bore you, but- suffice to say, the rhetoric that launched Grindelwald’s later atrocities… I ate at the same table. From the same plate. I only recognized it as poison- poison I’d willingly been imbibing, festering on, when-,” he cuts himself off, then says, in a hard tone, “When it cost me someone I loved dearly.”

Amy feels suddenly a weight on her chest. “You think- I’m like you, and-,”

“No,” says Dumbledore, forcefully. “You are nothing like me. Amy, when you were a girl of eighteen you had more compassion and good sense in your little toe than I had in my entire body. I can assure you of that. You are not responsible for Tom’s beliefs, for his hatred, for his feelings towards muggles and all he considers lesser than him. I give you great credit. If not for your influence, he might have been… Well, he might have strayed onto even darker paths during his time at school.”

“Don’t say that,” Amy says, shakily.

He nods, after a moment. “I apologize."

“But you defeated Grindelwald,” Amy says. “You fought him. You almost killed him.” 

“I did,” he says. “Much later than I could have, or should have. And now I fear I am making the same mistakes.”

“June wants Tom dead,” Amy says. “I’m sure you know. Tuft, too. They think he’s too dangerous to live. Was Grindelwald too dangerous to live?”

“Had I thought his current prison could not contain him…. Gellert was a broken man, in many places, by the time I finally reached him that night,” Dumbledore says. “His movement was fracturing, the muggle war was rapidly ending, he could no longer use its threat to fuel his own followers, and magical Europe was rising up against him en masse. Tom… is at the height of his power. At least, we must hope this is the height.”

“And if it isn’t?”

He just looks at her, and seems tremendously sad. “I should have done more,” he says. “When Tom was young. I should have… made more of an effort to take him under my wing, so to speak. But I confess, I was afraid. Afraid not of him, but that I would begin to project Gellert’s sins- my own sins, my insecurities, my regrets- onto an innocent child. That I would make a shadow on the wall into a monster. That I would create a villain where there was none, only a hurt, angry little boy.”

“Well, he did that work for you,” Amy says. “And if he could kill you, he would.”

Dumbledore nods gravely.

“Can he? Could he defeat you?” she presses. "With magic, in a duel?" 

She does not like the silence that follows.

“June thinks she could take him in a duel,” Amy says. “Maybe she can. I always thought you could. You’re the most powerful wizard there is.”

“Power isn’t everything, in a fight,” he says, very quietly.

I know, Amy thinks. I know it isn’t.

“I could have killed him,” she says. “When I left him the first time. I could have. I didn’t. So maybe it’s on me, too. The responsibility.”

“No,” he says again, forcefully. "No, Amy."

Amy just shrugs, trying to ignore the lump in her throat. “He doesn’t want me dead. I know that by now. But I think he could do it, if he had to kill me. If it was me or him. I know he would do it. There is nothing he wouldn’t do, if it meant staying in power. I’m just not a threat to him. Not anymore.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain of that, Amy,” Dumbledore says. He is studying her. It’s always made her uncomfortable, the way he dissects people with a steady gaze. 

“He knows all my tricks by now,” she says. “So. Cat’s out of the bag there. He has nothing to worry about.”

“No,” says Dumbledore, “I think one thing about you has always surprised him, Amy, and will continue to surprise him for as long as he lives.”

She wrinkles her nose. “And what’s that?”

“Your capacity to love,” he says. “And your capacity to forgive. He could not- would not- conceive of a world in which the woman who abandoned and rejected him would find it in her to love- to cherish- his child. To be willing to risk anything for that child. That was never something he could have predicted. And his horcrux’s lack of… shall we say, ill effects, during the time you briefly wore it, speaks to that, I believe.”

Amy frowns. “What are you saying? That I… caught his… soul... off guard?”

“Yes,” says Dumbledore. “There is a part of you- a part that loves so deeply and honestly, without expectation of anything in return- that he will never truly understand, a part he refuses to understand due to his own pride, and selfish conceit, and insecurity. And that, I think, spells and potions aside- that, terrifies him. Far more than I or June Carmody or Gregory Pike ever could.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. We're pretty firmly in the final section of the story (though we still have a lot of plot material to cover) now that Mae is beginning her fifth year. Similarly to in the canon HP books, the story is going to a lot more serious and dark (not that it wasn't before, but there will be less light-hearted and slice-of-life-y moments) as Mae is entering her late teens and Amy and others take a bolder stand against Tom. 
> 
> 2\. Yeah obviously I do not recommend leaving your cat to watch your baby. Even if it's a magical cat. 
> 
> 3\. Let me just put it out there that I don't know shit (or I should say I don't know enough shit) about legal stuff, financial crimes, or government fraud, so let's just all be prepared to suspend our disbelief when this fic gets into the weeds a bit. 
> 
> 4\. The Daily Prophet is pretty much useless at this point, they're very clearly being unofficially suppressed by the government, which is why Amy and company had no idea that Valerie was missing, the exact details of Therese's murder, or even about the prison break at Azkaban. 
> 
> 5\. It's pretty obvious at this point that June and Arthur are just humoring Dumbledore and his supporters, and aren't being very forthcoming about Tuft's own plans to take out Tom, which seem likely to be a lot less 'above the board', and a lot more likely to end with him dead, rather than put on trial and imprisoned. 
> 
> 6\. I didn't want Dumbledore to go into his whole backstory in detail with Amy (this is the first she's ever heard of him having siblings, and she doesn't know about his sister's death), but I did want them to discuss some of his past with Grindelwald, and what led him to make the choices he did, and how what he and Gellert had compares and contrasts with what Amy and Tom had. Dumbledore, unlike Amy, was a very willing and eager participant in a lot of Grindelwald's early scheming and plotting and explorations into dark magic. But like Amy, he separated himself from Grindelwald after Grindelwald hurt the people he cared about, and realized he could not support him or be in a relationship with him any longer. And like Amy, the two of them were estranged for years, until they finally reunited in a violent confrontation. 
> 
> 7\. Next chapter we'll be seeing some more werewolves, and also the start of Mae's fifth year and a lot of angsty teenage drama.


	49. Matthew VIII - Mae XXIII

LAKE DISTRICT NATIONAL PARK, SEPTEMBER 1961

“So, did your family ever vacation around here?” Matthew tries to ask casually, as he and Joan hike down a worn and overgrown trail deeper into the wooded valley. At the very least they’re not on some pureblood clan’s property right now, so they don’t have to worry about someone leaping out of the bushes and cursing them. The muggles are much more relaxed about these sorts of things. 

Joan’s silence is about all the answer he needs. He stops, coming up short in a patch of warm late summer sunshine. It’s a beautiful day; the sky is clear blue, though you can’t see it this deep in the wood, and the breeze is gentle and soothing as it whispers through the trees. But none of that changes the fact that a best case scenario for this afternoon might be them failing to locate the werewolves at all. 

He couldn’t risk bringing more people on this; they have Pike’s tacit approval, but he can’t officially announce that the aurors' office is considering striking a deal with rogue werewolves to take down the Minister, can he? And it’s not like they could risk the likes of Henry Rowle finding out about this. He and Joan aren’t defenseless, but their wands might not matter much if they’re outnumbered. 

Which is why they brought Fenrir. 

Matthew doesn’t exactly like the fact that they’ve covertly taken a prisoner awaiting trial on a quest that might just end up being a wild goose chase, but Fenrir isn’t a danger to them at present; he’s unconscious, not stunned but fast asleep from a potion courtesy of Slughorn himself. 

Levitating Fenrir above the ground, his hands cuffed together in front of him, Matthew is very aware that this is going to be a very disturbing sight in they happen to stumble upon some vacationing muggles, but at this point they’re far from the popular tourist trails and bike paths, and they haven’t seen or heard anyone in hours. 

“Can I just say,” Joan cuts in, in a low, flat tone, as they round another bend in the path, “That if we die out here, I am going to personally come back as a ghost, and drag you back with me. Just so I can kick you in the arse six ways to Sunday, Abbott.”

They’ve had this exact conversation several times in the past few hours, so Matthew isn’t surprised, just offers her what he hopes is a confident, self-assured look. “It’s going to work,” he says. “We have something they want- the kid. They have something we want- information. Joan, it’s going to work.”

“Or, they kill us,” Joan says. “Well, more accurately, we kill a few of them before they kill us, this ends up plastered across the front page of the Daily Prophet, Gaunt shuts down the entire office, puts Pike on leave, and this whole investigation goes belly-up. Dead in the water,” she clicks her tongue. 

Matthew would be lying if he hadn’t had the same doubts, but at this point, it’s far too late to turn back. “We have to try,” he says. “We have to know we did everything we could- if- if we’re right, if they have reason to hate the Knights- you heard him in that interview with Norbrook, June. They’ve seen the Knights in action. They know something. Maybe a lot of somethings.”

“Maybe they do,” Joan says, “and maybe they hate us just as much, and we’re setting our own mouse trap. They have no reason to trust us, or anything we say-,”

“We have him,” Matthew jerks his head at Fenrir, whose lank hair is falling across his eyes. In sleep, he looks peaceful, younger, his skin smoother, some of the scabs and scrapes having healed over, more weight on his lanky frame from getting solid meals for perhaps the first time in his life. 

“Right. As our prisoner. Chained up. I’m sure they’ll love that.”

“He’s not dead.”

“Look,” says Joan. “You know what, I’m a grown woman, you didn’t force me to go along with this. I’m here because we’re partners, and friends, and you’re a good man, Matt. Really, you are. I know you have the best of intentions, truly. And I want Gaunt taken down just as much as you do. But these werewolves- look what happened to Bonnie. That could have been me, or you. They just let her out of Mungo’s last month, after that wound got infected. She’s still not fully back on her feet. And if her partner finds out we tried this?” She mimes drawing an arrow and letting it go. 

In order to get Clive off their backs, they had to come up with a false tip off in East Yorkshire, miles and miles away. That should (hopefully) keep him preoccupied for the next few days, combing through the area while trying to evade the attention of any muggle authorities. Say what you will about werewolf hunters- they’re not exactly subtle. 

Their conversation trails off as they cross a rushing stream, and the break into a fragrant clearing, where the air is clearer, less stuffy, and the sky is briefly visible overhead. The long grasses brush up against Matthew’s knees, and nearly reach Joan’s thighs. Fenrir slumbers on, oblivious to the change in scenery, his chest gently rising and falling. 

Looking at him like this, Matthew feels an almost paternal rush of concern. Fenrir isn’t a little boy anymore. He’s a dangerous, almost grown man. Who likes causing pain. Who admits he enjoys, craves killing and violence. But he was a child once. And they- not just the Ministry, but all of them- failed him. It didn’t have to be this way, his life. There has to be a better way, beyond treating werewolves like criminals from the very beginning. That certainly didn’t help Fenrir Greyback. If anything, it created him. 

“Wait,” Joan snaps, and Matthew immediately halts.

The air flow has shifted. 

“Do you see something?” Matthew raises his wand, studying the meadow around them, gaze roving across the landscape. 

“No, I-,”

The grasses part, and suddenly a form rises up so fluidly Matthew almost thinks she apparated. But she was there all along, crouched down, perfectly hidden. The woman staring at them is not a muggle, he knows that instinctively. Sometimes you can feel it, locking eyes with another wizard or witch, a sort of crackle in the air, an unspoken understanding, a strange current. But he does not feel that now, but a profound other sense, not that he is looking at a witch hiding in plain sight, but something else entirely.

And then he recognizes her face. 

Five years ago feels like a lifetime, now, given all that happens then. He was a younger, naïve man, a fresh-faced rookie auror. And it was not very far from here, he suddenly realizes, not at all, at Windermere. 

He remembers the house in the quiet glade not far from the waterfront, hidden from muggle eyes, a charming, white-painted Victorian with a cheerful bronze door knocker and airy curtains on all the front windows, fluttering in the wind once you walked through the door. 

What was inside was less charming. The Sadler vacation home had been ransacked, completely turned over. Furniture was toppled and shattered, rugs in disarray, blood spatter along the walls and down the stairs. Bernard Sadler was nowhere to be found; muggle boaters found his corpse six days later, drifting in some reeds. 

His mother was dead, not of any magical attack but a shock induced heart attack, the coroner claimed. His wife was found in the kitchen, in such a state that Matthew does not like to think about it, even now, chanting her children’s names under her breath, wild-eyed and blank-faced. 

And the children- well, not children, really, but young adults, both fresh graduates of Hogwarts- they were missing. Matthew studied the family photos on the walls with the rest of the team, trying to memorize their features for the coming search that expected to find them as dead as their father. They never did. They had simply… vanished into thin air. 

Months later, it was privately decided that whatever their attackers had done to them, afterwards the bodies must have been magically disposed of. Hardly uncommon. Especially, he would realize much later, for the Knights of Walpurgis. Why take the risk of leaving valuable evidence lying around, unless you want to prove a point? 

The point was proved anyways. The Sadler family was destroyed. Their business was bought out by competitors and absorbed. Their assets redistributed, their properties sold, like sharks descending on chum. 

And now Matthew is looking at one. In the photographs Sylvie Sadler was a winsome, smiling young woman in her graduation robes and hat, clutching her diploma against her chest, her freckled face creased with self-conscious pride, blinking from every flash of the camera, a lock of dark brown hair escaping from under her pointed witch’s hat. Pretty, in a down to earth sort of way, and very intelligent- you could see it in her dark eyes. 

The woman staring at him now isn’t eighteen anymore, of course, and looks far older than twenty three. She is gaunt, thin, hardened and leathered by years of exposure to the elements, and her brown hair seems dull and lusterless, tied back in a rough braid that reaches her waist. 

She wears a ragged blouse tucked into a pair of men’s work trousers, those tucked into ratty boots, splattered with mud and grime. She carries herself differently, as well; she stands slightly slouched, almost crouched, as if prepared to sink down into her haunches at any moment. 

There is no light in her dark eyes, none at all, and while her skin is not as pockmarked as Fenrir’s, she is scarred seemingly all over, from what’s visible of her arms, to her neck, to her face, old scratches raised white against her flesh. 

For a moment they stand there in silence, evaluating one another.

“Smelled you a long way off,” she says, hoarsely. Her gaze is fixed on Fenrir’s unconscious form. “Smelled him. I could find him anywhere.”

“You know his scent that well?” Joan manages to regain her voice in order to ask almost calmly, casually. 

Matthew is perpetually scanning their surroundings; they could have sent her in first to distract them while they plot an attack. But there are no other signs of life besides the cry of a hawk overhead. 

“A wolf relies on scent.”

“Is that what you are?” Joan asks steadily. “I know what your name is, where you come from. Where have you been, Sylvie?”

Sylvie shrugs. “Here. There. Everywhere.” Her tone isn’t aggressive, but cool, almost detached; she doesn’t look frightened of them, just wary. “I know it’s just the two of you,” she says. “Not like the last time.”

“This won’t be like the last time,” Matthew says. “We- I’m Matthew, this is Joan- we don’t want to hurt you. Or Fenrir. He’s alright, he’s just asleep.”

“He smells different,” Sylvie says. Her nose wrinkles. “He smells like humans again.”

“You are humans,” Joan tries. “You… you have an illness, but you are still human, Sylvie. We can help you. All of you.”

“Can you?” Sylvie crosses her arms. They are strong, wiry when they flex under her tattered blouse, as if she’s been doing hard physical labor, lifting and carrying and climbing, for years. “How?”

“You want revenge,” Matthew says. “Against- against the Knights of Walpurgis? Isn’t that right?” It makes sense now, at least in part. If Sylvie Sadler is one of them, if this is all about her family, what happened to them-

“I don’t want revenge,” Sylvie scoffs, and some anger bleeds into her voice, she sounds like Fenrir for a moment. “I want Avery’s throat between my teeth, like his son’s when I tore it out,” she speaks calmly, concisely, tone mellowing once more, even as her speech grows more violent. “I want Virgil Mulciber to cry, and beg, and I want to hear him piss himself when he sees me coming. I want to smell his fear. I want his cousins, too, the twins. One for me, one for Robin.” 

She raises her chin and the sunlight dapples her face. Her eyelids flutter, as if she’s envisioning something. “I want to bury myself in their chests, and pull out their hearts. I’ve done it before. It’s not so hard.”

“You wouldn’t call that revenge?” Joan asks, after a moment.

Sylvie’s eyes open all the way. In this light, there is some gold in the dark of them. 

“No,” she says. “Do you know what Castor Mulciber told my father, while he was torturing him? Killing him? While his sons held me and my brother down? While his nephew hurt my mother? And the Averys laughed, and watched, and begged for more?”

“He said, this is just the natural way of it. You’re just a lamb. You thought you could be a wolf? You thought you could step above your place, Sadler? Let me remind you. This is the natural order. The lambs bleat. The wolves eat.” 

“I don’t call it revenge,” says Sylvie. “The wolf has to eat. And I like to eat other wolves the best. Even with my lamb teeth.”

Something rustles behind them; Matthew and Joan both look around, tense, but see nothing, hear nothing. But something- someone is there all the same. Matthew can feel their alien gaze on his back.

“My brother is watching you,” Sylvie says. “He worries. We don’t trust you, aurors.”

“I don’t blame you,” Matthew says. “We- we failed your family. I’m sorry. We couldn’t give them justice.”

“You gave them nothing,” Sylvie opens her hands, as if to let go of something, and shakes her head, her braid thumping against her shoulder. “Less than nothing."

“Gaunt leads the ones who hurt your family,” Joan says firmly. “We can bring him down. If you testify. You and your brother.”

“And afterwards, you’ll wrap me up in silver chains, and throw me in the sea,” she smiles hollowly. 

“No,” says Matthew. “No. We will- we can pardon you. Help you. Once we take them out, see them charged, we can help you, all of you. And all werewolves. It doesn’t have to be like this. The running and hiding, the fighting-,”

“I like to run,” Sylvie says. "I'm good at it."

“This life is killing you,” Joan replies, eyes narrowed. “I know you know that, Sylvie. Five years… it’s been five years, and it’s aged you fifteen. You know this cannot go on forever.”

“Set him down,” Sylvie nods at Fenrir. “I want to see his face.”

Matthew and Joan exchange a look, then slowly lower Fenrir to the ground. He slumps there, still asleep. To their surprise, Sylvie takes one step forward, then another, then crouches down beside him, though she keeps her face upturned to them. If they wanted to pounce on her, now would be the time. Matthew glances at Joan, and keeps still. 

Sylvie stares intently at them for a moment longer, then turns back to Fenrir. Almost maternally, sisterly, she brushes his hair out of his eyes and cups his face with her hands, then presses a quick kiss to his brow. She rises all at once, fluid and graceful, and backs away. 

“Don’t wake him,” she says. “It would hurt him to be so close to me, to us. His family.”

“You think of yourselves that way?” Joan asks carefully.

“How else would we?” Sylvie replies. “You think we don’t love one another? Take care of one another?”

“I- I don’t know,” Matthew admits. “We don’t know anything about you.”

“If you did, we would already be stuffed and mounted on your walls, or in a classroom,” Sylvie traces a scar on her neck mindlessly, as if recollecting something. “Your hunters. They want us dead.”

“They aren’t in charge here.”

“And who is? You tell me you are aurors who hate the Minister. You are humans who wish to work with wolves against your own flock.”

“We’re not a flock,” Joan snaps. “We are all people.”

“I am?” Sylvie asks. “I don’t think I am, to you. I was. That girl who rushed into the woods, to hide, to flee, she was. You cared about her, I’m sure. Maybe you still do. But now?” she shrugs. “I’m a monster. A predator. You might think better of me, to hear me speak, to know I’m not some mindless brute. But you would never trust me. Never accept me.”

“Trust works both ways,” Matthew says. “Hunt animals, not people. Agree to help us. Agree to go public, Sylvie. And we will release Fenrir to you. You can live peacefully. The Ministry can find a place for you.”

Her expression twists in contempt. “A prison.”

“A sanctuary,” Joan says. “Somewhere you could live amongst yourselves.”

“The same Ministry led by the man whose knights murdered my father,” Sylvie says.

“Not after you speak out against him,” Matthew says. 

“And they would believe me?”

“Your story is too mad to not be true,” Joan says, blunt as ever. 

Sylvie barks with laughter. She glances over Fenrir again. “He looks well. He has always struggled. He was just a child when he received the Bite. And so fearful. Timid. We tried- the others tried their best to teach him, to raise him to glory in himself, and what he is, instead of loathing it, fearing it. Too many of us destroy ourselves out of shame.”

You taught him to love the slaughter, Matthew thinks, but holds his tongue.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Sylvie says. “You think I’m bloodthirsty. That all of us are. That we can’t dream of anything but death and hunger now. But that isn’t so different from many of your own kind. I have teeth, and claws, and once a month I kill as I please, and I eat until I am sated. But the wizards I have known, among you… they think it’s their right to feast every night. To gorge themselves whenever they please. You should call them monsters. Not me.”

THE HOGWARTS EXPRESS, SEPTEMBER 1961

It seems a little ridiculous that Mae has never actually set foot on the Hogwarts Express before this year, but as suspicious as she was when Mum suggested she take the train for once (just for the experience, or she claimed in that faux-chipper ‘everything’s just fine’ voice of hers), she wasn’t going to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. 

The train ride is basically the least-supervised part of the entire school year, for students. No professors, no rules (besides the odd patrolling prefect or conductor), and nothing to do except nap, eat candy, and gossip. Essentially, a teenage paradise. Alec Carstairs claims people ‘get it on’ during the train ride all the time, but Alec Carstairs is pathetically sex crazed, like most boys their age. 

Mae is in said loo now, critically inspecting her appearance in the mirror as the train rattles through the London suburbs. She’s already wondering if Mum just wanted her out of the house and nowhere near the school- maybe Dumbledore’s having one of his little order meetings again, and they’re afraid she’ll crash it. Or inadvertently mention it to her father. Her lips curl derisively at the thought as she checks her teeth- still straight and white. 

Fifteen is an odd age, she decided months ago. She’s most assuredly not a little girl anymore, and feels like she’s leaving puberty in the dust now that she’s more or less stopped growing in height, having topped out at a comfortable five foot five, to her relief. Her mum says that’s nonsense, and that fifteen is not in the least the same as an adult woman, physically or mentally. Mae wrinkles her snubbed nose. It’s cute, she decides. 

The rest of her isn’t cute; she’s too tall and skinny to be cute, really, she doesn’t have a round face or rosebud lips. Maybe her blue eyes would be sweeter looking if she had blonde hair, like Christine or Agneza. Instead they look perpetually startled in her narrow face, framed by thin dark eyebrows and dark brown hair. 

She’s ditched the bangs entirely and is parting her hair down the center; she wants to start straightening it, but Mum says next year she can. For now it’s only to her shoulders, barely, and still descends in waves. It’s popular to curl it up at the ends, but she couldn’t care less what’s popular. She wants to look like someone who ought to be taken seriously. Who should be feared. Not a gawky, freckled, slack-jawed teenage girl. 

She smiles tightly at her reflection in the tarnished mirror, stained from years of smoke and cracked near the bottom. But she doesn’t look cool and cutting; she just looks constipated. Huffing, Mae rummages through her leather satchel- the good part is that her luggage is already up in her dorm room, so she doesn’t have to worry about that, produces a stick of bubble gum, and pops it into her mouth, chewing decisively. This will have to do. 

She steps out into the noisy, narrow corridor, just in time for a compartment to her left to open up, as a crowd of new prefects pours out. Mae wasn’t exactly heartbroken when she didn’t receive a badge in the mail, though Mum seemed a bit disappointed. Mae doesn’t know; it’s not like she was ever aiming for teacher’s pet, and honestly, there’s no way Professor Finch would ever name her prefect. She behaves in his class - usually - but she’s far from a star student when it comes to Astronomy, not because she’s clueless, but because she’s usually bored out of her mind. 

“Remember to take your new handbooks!” The new Head Girl, a short, plump Hufflepuff named Pomona Sprout is hurrying after her underlings, most of whom tower over her, as they briskly walk away, looking relieved to be out of what was probably an incredibly tedious meeting. As far as Mae can tell, most of being a prefect revolves around smugly congratulating yourself for your newfound power, than using that newfound power to be as insufferable as possible.

For that matter, she’s not shocked to see some of her fellow fifth years who made the cut - John Amory and Judy Ziskind from Gryffindor, naturally, Bill Bones and Winnie Cloud from Hufflepuff, Ambrose Bulstrode and Margaret Adler from Slytherin, and… Malcolm McGonagall and Marian Darvesh from Ravenclaw. 

Ambrose offers her a brief smile, to her surprise- maybe he’s prepared to let bygones be bygones, even after she froze him out for most of last year, which is surprisingly touching, but doesn’t stop to make conversation; Margaret is chattering away about something, her hands moving a mile a minute to illustrate her point. 

Malcolm and Marian come up short, though, and Mae meets Marian’s cool gaze with one of her own. 

“What’s with your hair?” Mae asks, instead of “Let’s be friends again.” or “I’m sorry, I overreacted when you confronted me about my dad actually being the despotic Minister of Magic.”

“Jesus Christ,” Malcolm mutters to himself, leaning his forehead against the wall. She could ask what’s up with his hair, too- he seems to finally be growing it out of a strict crew cut, and to her surprise it actually looks darker and curlier than she’d expected, after years of seeing so little of it. But Marian is wearing a headscarf, like the ones her mum wears, only a few tendrils of dark hair visible. 

“Really?” Marian asks. “Are you really starting with this? You’ve seen me pray every day for five years, you know when I fast-,”

“It was just a question,” Mae mutters, flushing. 

Why would she care when Marian prays? It never really registered before. Marian’s family is Muslim and Malcolm and Christine’s are Catholic and Valerie’s- she doesn’t want to think about Valerie right now- anyways, it’s not Mum raised her with much religion. They went to church on holidays, sometimes. Usually never the same church twice, like her mum was hoping to get some new and exciting message if she switched it up enough, or maybe hear what she wanted to know. 

“Yes, well, it’s a question you can ask without coming off like a git,” Marian folds her arms across her freshly pressed blazer, but honestly, the fact that she’s arguing with Mae is a good sign. If she was really truly furious she’d have stalked off a while ago, her nose in the air. 

“Sorry,” says Mae. “You cover your hair now?”

“Yes,” says Marian, in a calmer tone. 

“And it’s not because her parents are making her,” Malcolm cuts in, then reddens even more than Mae, who has regained most of her pride. “Sorry. I knew you were going to ask.”

“He asked,” Marian informs Mae flatly. 

“Marian’s parents don’t make her do anything,” Mae rolls her eyes. “I’m not that stupid.”

“Why do I bother, I really wonder,” Malcolm mutters, then gropes at her satchel. “I see you chewing like a bloody cow. Give me some.”

Mae gives him a dirty look, and rummages in her bag. 

“My parents aren’t making me, it’s a hijab or a rousari if you want to sound clever, I have more than one, and I’ve already heard every kind of pseudo-intellectual snide comment on it in the past hour on this train, so if you have anything else to add, get it out of the way now.”

“Yes,” Malcolm whispers to himself in triumph, as he unwraps the gum and pops it into his mouth. 

“It’s pretty,” Mae says, which isn’t a lie; the material is dark blue speckled with orange flowers and clearly supposed to match Marian’s Ravenclaw uniform. 

“Thank you,” Marian exhales. “My mum had three separate meetings with Dippet and that shit Nott over the summer about it, when I told her I wanted to start wearing it.”

“They tried to ban it?”

“Nott thought it might be construed as un-English,” Marian says shortly. "As if half of the purebloods aren't regularly bragging about their Norman ancestry and teaching their kids French at home."

“Like you said,” Malcolm says, “He’s a shit.”

They make their way to the nearest empty compartment; Mae can’t help the rush of relief that she and Marian are speaking again. As soon as the door is shut behind them, conversation inevitably turns to Valerie- where is she, does anyone know, is she dead in a ditch somewhere, will they ever see her again?

“I think my mum knows where she is,” Mae says. “But she’s not letting on anymore than that. She tried to pull the ‘for your own protection’ nonsense. But I guess that means Valerie’s alive. At least.” It feels very strange to be counting ‘alive’ as the bar to clear. 

“Christine’s been worried sick,” Marian says. “She was writing me about it all summer. Her dad’s looking for Valerie.”

“Great,” Malcolm mutters. “Yeah. I’m sure he has the best of intentions.”

“Alright, Christine’s dad is an evil pig, but what is with you?” Mae asks in exasperation, watching the town they are passing through fall away as they venture into the sunlit countryside. “You’re in such a mood, Mal.”

He clamps up, stone-faced. 

Marian gives her a little look. 

“Oh,” Mae says. “Is it- is it Maureen? Is she alright?”

“We split up,” Malcolm says tersely, training his gaze out the window. 

An awkward silence follows. 

“Did… did her foster parents find out about you?”

“No,” he says. “She wants to focus on her schoolwork this year. OWLS.”

Marian nods approvingly, then catches Mae’s look and turns it into a more sympathetic expression. 

“She was always a bit drippy,” Mae reflects. 

“Oi,” Malcolm snaps. “Watch it.”

She holds up her hands in surrender. “Fine. Sorry. Won’t mention her again.”

Marian rather forcibly changes the topic of conversation to something lighter - OWLs and careers, of course. It’s still Marian. 

“I’m thinking about law,” Marian says. “It would horrify my parents.”

“What do they want you to do?” Mae yawns, slouching in her seat, ignoring the way it rumples her uniform skirt, and picking a stray thread in her socks. “Healing?”

“They want me to go into something like astronomy. Or potions,” she sniffs. “Something with less government interference.”

“You could be a barrister who really sticks it to the man,” Mae says. 

“I could,” Marian seems rather pleased at the insinuation. 

“Well, I’m going to be a mediwizard,” Malcolm says, obstinate as ever.

“I thought you used to want to be a doctor,” Mae smirks.

“Basically the same thing.”

“Actually, I think healers are closer to doctors, mediwizards are more like medics-,”

“Still more of a plan than you have,” he points out. 

Marian glances at her in concern. “Mae, you don’t have any idea of what you want to do after graduation?”

There’s a familiar rapping at the door. 

“Open it!” Malcolm barks, and Christine does so, revealing a slightly flushed face, as if she just ran down the length of the train. Her hair is contained to a bouncy ponytail; she’s finally dropped the pigtails. 

“Where’ve you been?” Marian asks her; Christine doesn’t immediately step inside, but stands in the doorway, balancing herself on the doorframe as the train rattles around a turn. 

“With Slughorn,” she says. “He wants to see you, Mae.”

“Professor Slughorn’s on the train?” Mae frowns. She knows Slughorn isn’t her enemy, exactly, know he’s ostensibly ‘one of the good ones’, working with Dumbledore and her mum, but that doesn’t mean she’s eager to have a good long chat with the man. “Why?”

“He always rides it, I suppose, to get to know the students,” Christine crosses and uncrosses her legs. “Come on, then, I can’t keep him waiting- I got stuck behind the trolley lady.”

She seems a bit harried but not upset or frightened, which Mae takes as a decent sign. 

“Fine,” she says reluctantly, standing up. “But I’m getting some snacks on the way.”

She pilfers a few cauldron cakes off the trolley as she and Christine edge around it further down the corridor, then goes back and pays for them when Christine turns big scandalized doe eyes on her petty thievery. 

“You’d better wipe those crumbs off your clothes,” Christine says insistently, as they reach the end of the car. “It’s not just him in there.”

Mae stops in her tracks, rooted with a sudden horror that her father might be in there. 

“What’s wrong?” Christine touches her arm. “I mean, it’s him and a bunch of Slytherins, mostly. And us.”

Mae relaxes minutely, brushing crumbs from her blouse. “Oh. Why’s he got all those people in there with him?” She can deal with some Slytherins. That’s a pile of kittens compared to Tom Gaunt. 

“I think he might be starting up Slug Club again,” Christine sounds genuinely thrilled. “Imagine if he asks us to join!”

“Oh, Merlin,” Mae mutters.

“This is serious!” Christine snaps. “Don’t you know how good that looks on a CV, Slug Club? A recommendation from someone as famous as Horace Slughorn?”

Mae is pretty sure if she played her cards right, she could get a letter of recommendation from the Minister himself, but she’d honestly rather be run over with this very locomotive. 

Entering Slughorn’s compartment is a very disorienting experience, because it’s been magically charmed to be twice as large as usual, like in they’re in some first class suite on the Titanic barreling straight for the iceberg. If only.

But really, it’s more like something out of The Twilight Zone, which Mae watched with rapt attention when Mum and her visited Aunt Vera this summer. Isaac and Joel had to go to bed at their usual time, but Mae sat on the floor, knees drawn up under her chin, mesmerized by the television set; she’d only ever watched them in shops before.

Slughorn sits there like some bastard child of Father Christmas and the Green Knight, all decked out in his house colors. She reckons it must sting that they can’t just make him Head of House again; Carmody took over Slytherin after he left, and like any absolute monarch, won’t be deposed unless someone lops her head off. 

“Miss Applewhite, Miss Benson,” he says enthusiastically as they enter, the door shutting softly behind them. 

The spotless white tablecloth is piled high with all sorts of sweets and confections, and not the cheap mass produced ones they sell on the trolley, the properly artisanal stuff. They even have ice cream. Mae feels as though she ought to be in petticoats and a bustle or something, but maybe that’s just all the Slytherins staring at them with thinly veiled contempt. 

Alright, she’s exaggerating slightly; it’s not all Slytherins. Just mostly. Slughorn has gathered a dozen or so students, all fifth, sixth, or seventh years, all either incredibly smart, incredibly rich, incredibly good-looking, or some combination of the three. Whoever’s going to make him look good in photos, she assumes. She has no idea how her mother ever put up with this. 

Fred Avery is there, running his fingers through his coiffed hair with an effortless air of casual elegance. Mae has the sudden urge to hex him. Walter Avery is there too, though she feels a bit sorry for him; Fred is at least handsome; Walter still looks like a stumpy little twelve year old. 

There’s the Prewett brothers, of course; they’re sixth year Gryffindor twins, red-headed, freckled, and nearly identical, whispering back and forth to each other and looking like they’re on the verge of combusting with snickers over some private joke. 

A sea of other unfamiliar, haughty faces; at least Mick isn’t here, God knows she can only handle one Applewhite at a time- oh, and there’s Stephen Travers and Elias Fawley, just what she needed. Travers sees her and looks rather pleased. 

Mae wishes Ambrose were here; his friends are less insufferably dim when he’s around. Travers is lucky he’s rich, because not much is happening for him in the looks department, and his Potions marks are atrocious. He’d better step it up this year if he doesn’t want the Slug to give him the boot. 

“Sit down, sit down- Fabian, move over, my boy- there you are, girls,” Slughorn says when Mae and Christine have finally wormed into seats. 

Mae finds Travers on the other side of her, to her dismay, but isn’t mean enough to make Christine change places with her. He shoots her another sickly grin out of the corner of his mouth, which she ignores. 

He always has something to say, when he sees her; she’d initially assumed it was just because he wanted to tease Ambrose about being tutored by a ‘filthy mudblood’, but now she thinks he genuinely believes they have some sort of acquaintance, as if she were eagerly awaiting whatever terribly unfunny comment is about to seep out of his mouth like sewage. Boys always seem to think girls are just hanging on their every word. Grown men, too. It’s like a mental fugue upon them all. 

“Well,” Slughorn says jovially, when they’re all settled, more or less. “And how was everyone’s summer?” 

Typically, one of the girls has been asked to pour tea; Mae covers her cup with her hand and a flat look; she’d really quite like a harder drink, especially as she’s never actually had one unless you count a very small glass of wine. Mum keeps the good stuff under lock and key; she knows Mae too well. It figures. Mum was probably chugging stolen church wine with Tom Riddle at Mae’s age. 

Indignities upon indignities, they’re all forced to participate in an ice-breaking activity. Mae can think of some things she’d like to do with an icepick at the moment, and cheerfully relating her amusements over the summer holidays is not one of them. 

“I watched The Twilight Zone and read comics,” she announces when it’s her turn. Christine shoots her a horrified look. 

“Comics like Marvin the Muggle?” Gideon Prewett asks, perking up. Wizard comics are deadly dull, at least most of the ones marketed at children are. That’s why Mae only bothers with the gory ones; at least they have a plot beyond ‘muggles are so stupid; aren’t we clever? Hee hee!’. 

“No,” Mae selects a biscuit from the platter being passed down the table, removing her gum from her mouth. “Batman.” Actually, she prefers Superman, but only because Lex Luthor seems more like a villain she’d know in real life. Dr. Freeze, not so much. 

An awkward silence follows, which she relishes; it’s not like she wants much to be here. Then Christine hurriedly launches into a breathless account of her family’s vacation at Lake Windermere.

“Imagine her in a swimming costume,” Travers is whispering to Fawley. 

“What is there to imagine?” Fawley snorts, eying Christine in a way that makes Mae’s blood boil. 

“Would you shut up?” Mae hisses over at them, surprised by just how angry she is. Luckily, no one notices over the din of adolescent chatter.

“Sorry,” Travers turns that foul smile on her again. “I’d much rather discuss you, Benson. Say, do you ever go dipping in the Black Lake-,”

Mae decides that’s not even worth a retort, and angles herself away from him, cutting herself a piece of fudge, and plastering her gum under the table. 

Once they’ve all related the sorry state of their holidays, Slughorn gets around to his usual spiel, which boils down to explaining that the Slug Club is devoted to the ‘refinement of young minds’ and ‘networking’, which basically translates to everyone sitting down discussing who’s father is going to hire who, Mae assumes. If only they knew. They’d all be lined up down the bloody train to get in a good word with hers. 

Then he has everyone discuss what line of work they’re considering going into. Gideon Prewett wants to be an auror; Fabian Prewett wants to be a cursebreaker. Agneza wants to be a wandmaker; that’s an odd one. The Avery brothers don’t actually need jobs, so they just say ‘history’ or ‘philosophy’ or something like that. 

“Banking,” Travers informs the group, straightening his tie, which has a jam stain on it. 

Fawley wants to be a potioneer. Right. He’ll be lucky if he pulls an Acceptable on his OWL. 

Christine wants to be a duelist, to everyone’s visible incredulity; a few scattered laughs break out, but Mae, while surprised, doesn’t think it’s that far-fetched. Most of these people have never seen Christine duel. She’s good, once she drops the prim and proper act and starts dancing, not just standing and aiming her wand like a flare gun. 

“And what about you, Miss Benson?” Slughorn’s eyes twinkle over her like she’s a child on Christmas morning.

Mae tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, and very seriously says, “I want to be a werewolf hunter. There’s a serious market for them at the moment.”

Approximately half a second later she realizes that, even though she was trying to be provocative, maybe she shouldn’t have said that right in front of the Avery boys, whose father was killed by one. You could hear a fly chewing in the silence that follows. 

She half expects Slughorn to throw her out right then and there, but after a queasy smile and a few half-hearted chuckles, he steers them back on topic, and no one so much as makes eye contact with her for the next hour. 

When they’ve run out of small talk, Slughorn tells them all his office hours, makes them promise to all drop by for tea next week, and sends them on their way, presumably so he can take a nap or something. He seems even older than Dumbledore, somehow, despite the lack of a gloriously long proper wizard’s beard. 

Feeling some belated guilt- just in general, she does feel like maybe she has been a bit of a venomous little bitch today, taking out her anger on people who have nothing to do with her father, or her mother, or any of it- Mae hangs around in the corridor, waiting for Christine, who is chatting gaily with the Prewetts.

Travers descends like a vulture in the meanwhile, smoothing down his rumpled green blazer. He’s had an unpleasant growth spurt that means his head is no longer too big for his spindly body, but it’s done terrible things to his shoulders. Aren’t rich people supposed to be able to afford the best tailors? He needs a bigger jacket. 

“I thought it was funny,” he says. “Your little joke. They need to lighten up, that lot. No one has a sense of humor these days.”

Great, now she really knows she oughtn’t to have made it. Mae tosses him a derisive stare, which he seems to take as some sort of acceptance of his presence. He sidles closer. 

“I just wanted to say,” Travers says, “I think you’re alright, Benson.”

“Get a life,” she retorts. 

“I’m serious,” he insists. “You might be a muggleborn, but you’re the cleverest girl in our year. Everyone says so.” To her surprise, his tone doesn’t sound that mocking, though there’s this constant smirk playing on his lips. 

Mae doesn’t actually thinks she is the cleverest girl in their year. In terms of overall grades, that’s either Christine or Marian. She’s not that cocky. Anymore. 

“What?” she stares at him from under her lashes, trying to convey her disdain. “Do you need tutoring? I’ll do it for four galleons an hour.” Maybe he’s actually stupid enough to take her up on it.

Instead he smiles. “No. But I’ll give you four galleons worth of whatever you want from Honeydukes if you go out with me, first Hogsmeade weekend.” His cologne isn’t that bad, but it’s extremely overpowering. What is it with boys? Do they just bathe in it? 

Mae blanches, waiting for the sneering ‘just kidding’, but it never comes. 

“It figures you’d have to pay for a girl to be seen in public with you,” she says coolly instead, nodding to his tie. He glances down in dismay, face falling. 

“Mae!” 

Christine is coming over; Mae gives Travers another frigid look and brushes past, linking arms with Christine, to her vocal surprise. “Come on. Walk faster. Travers is losing his grip on reality.”

“I think Gideon likes me,” Christine says happily, though she has to stride almost comically long to keep up with Mae’s long legs. 

“Well, that’s swell for you,” says Mae, then, seeing the hurt look on Christine’s open face, amends it. “No, I mean- that’s great, Christine. Really. He seems… nice.”

“He is,” says Christine, then adds with a rebellious edge. “Plus, Mickey hates him.”

That does get a genuine laugh out of Mae, as they hurry back to their compartment, while the train leaves the sunny rolling hills behind and begins to enter the darker part of the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Notes:
> 
> 1\. The Sadler family was first mentioned several chapters back, when Amy confronts June via Veritaserum. Sylvie and Robin, their twin children, obviously have good reason to hate the Knights of Walpurgis and the Ministry in general. 
> 
> 2\. Mae's teen angst (though she's had plenty before this) is now in full swing, along with an increasing awareness of teenage sexuality and relationships, many of which are cropping up left and right now that she and her friends are 15/16. 
> 
> 3\. Mae at least knows Valerie is somewhere safe, but not where she is, as Amy thinks it's better that she doesn't know. The mutual concern over Valerie at least has reconciled Mae and Marian, who have been on the outs since Marian confronted her about her father's identity. Tom has Michael Applewhite searching for Valerie, as by now he has realized she has potentially incriminating evidence that she stole from the Notts. 
> 
> 4\. Stephen Travers thinks he invented negging. 
> 
> 5\. Next chapter will be all Lydia.


End file.
